Yesterday I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon. I like to joke that I wanted to put the 3.1 back into 13.1 (it was my 31st birthday and a half-marathon is 13.1 miles).
However, it was really because I wanted to complete the Grand Prix: the five half marathons that are run in each of New York’s boroughs. Last year I ran the other four, but I missed Brooklyn as Wen and I were away that weekend. Hence, this year, it had to happen.
Unfortunately, I haven’t really been training much this year. Plus yesterday was a really humid day (75% humidity). All of this meant that I got reacquainted to my friend “The Wall“. Through the magic of technology, I can show you roughly the exact distance at which he returned:
This graph shows my pace (minutes/kilometer) over the 21 km of the race. The data come from my Garmin ForeRunner (the data’s not smooth as the GPS connection occasionally disappears and the Garmin software is terrible).
The six big spikes: that’s when I had to stop to walk. Three times it was due to the fact that I was getting water (I’m still dehydrated 36 hours later) and three times it was because I was so exhausted that I thought I might just keel over.
Sadly, I did see some people keel over. The last kilometer of the race was along the Coney Island boardwalk; at one point I looked over and saw that a spectator was in fact a racer vomiting all over the ground.
Further down the boardwalk, three men stood in the middle of the course and my glycogen-starved brain thought they were the world’s most obnoxious tourists posing for a photograph. When I got closer, I realized that it was two locals holding up a guy who had collapsed from the humidity a mere couple of hundred of meters from the finish line.
Speaking of the finish, it was right in front of the old Parachute Jump; a grand landmark to signal the end of the race:
Here are some other random notes from the race:
- There were 11,800 people in the race; you were surrounded by people the entire way
- According the Marty Moscowitz, the borough president who started the race, 1 in 8 Americans can trace their history to Brooklyn. Also, if Brooklyn were a city, it would be the fourth-largest in America
- The race shut down Ocean Parkway, causing a few irate drivers. There’s got to be a business in creating an SMS service alerting drivers to upcoming road closures. Cities would input road closures and people could subscribe to be notified of closures in certain areas. The service would be free to end users and the city would pay for it. Could be interesting