I didn't know there was an 8:30 AM on Saturdays

NY Sports Club has this thing called XpressLine, which is a group of 8 machines designed to give you a complete workout in 22 minutes. They train you on it as part of your membership, and after that lousy run on Wednesday, I knew my session to do that on Thursday was just what I needed to get right back into it.

So I skipped the session to watch TV instead.

Friday night we went out for my friend's birthday, which, as he mentioned once or twice, wasn't actually on Friday. Of course, I had to have several drinks and a late Chinese dinner.

That got me in perfect shape for the NYRR 8000, an 8k run in Central Park at 8:30 this morning. But somehow, I did manage to wake up 10 minutes before my 7:00 alarm, get up to the park, and do the run. It ended up being, I'm almost positive, the first time I've run a race at or better than 10 min miles. According to my trusty runner's GPS, the race went a little long at 5.05 miles, which I ran in 49:57, or a 9:53/mi pace. I have trouble believing this, but Garmin claims I crossed the finish line at 12.7 mph.

That was my first time running in Central Park. It's a nice place to run. On the other hand, it's a nice place for almost anything you could do in a park, so that's not really surprising. Finishing the race earned me my first of the 9 qualifying races I have to run, plus the one I have to volunteer for, in order to gain automatic entry to the 2010 NYC marathon. I'll be volunteering as a chip clipper next Sunday at the Colon Cancer Challenge 4 mi run/15k run/1.7 mi walk to fulfill that part of the requirement.

Of course, I'm sure Beth will blog later today about how she ran 6 miles at 7 min per, all uphill, in a blizzard, carrying 40 lb of weight. Or, maybe she'll just walk around a 6 block area to go apartment shopping and call it "exercise." Definitely one of the two.