Manhattan Half Marathon

from my workout journal for the day:

Sun, August 28
 1:25:17 (6:30 per mile)

 I finished 27th out of 701 in the 19-29 age group for men.
 I finished 89th out of 3570 men, total.
 I finished 94th out of 6328 runners, total. (Five women beat me.)

 [Felt pretty strong. Could've pushed harder, didn't know the distance
  all that well. Saw Gabe Winkler at the finish line, ran past Leah
  about mile 4 or so. Actually didn't really have any aches and pains
  afterwards. I don't have splits, but I think I was very consistent
  speedwise.]

Leah asked if I wanted to run this with her, a few weeks before. I figured, "What the hell? Could be fun." I hadn't run in a race in four or five years, and those were only 10k, which is a bit less than half this distance.
I came in worried that I wouldn't be able to do very well. I figured a good guess would be to run about 7:30/mile pace. I just trusted my gut and ran without paying much attention to other runners or time, and only realized how fast I was going about six miles in.

Coming into the last few hundred yards. (I started about 19 minutes after the gun, but had a ChampionChip in my shoe which determined my accurate time electronically. That's why the sign says 1:42, though I finished in 1:25.)

Swimming Heart Lake, end of second day's hike

Gwen is reading Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Silas is taking the picture, and I'm in the middle of swimming the long way across Heart Lake at the end of our second day of hiking. It took about 12 minutes to swim over, and then another 12 to swim back.

Descending Algonquin. It was slippery as holy fuck, and I was half-blind from lack of spectacles, and the other half blind from the fog. Less than ideal, but I had a great time.

As can be seen in this photo, the weather for the second day's hike was not as nice. It was socked in pretty good towards the summit, with high winds and zero visibility. I don't have my glasses on in this picture, because I was afraid they were going to blow off my face and be lost forever.

Hiking in the Lake Placid Environs

This was a fun trip.

Silas Alben, Gwen Taylor, and I took a weekend in late August to do a little hiking and camping in the Adirondacks near Lake Placid.

We hiked Giant mountain on the first day. The weather was not that warm, but agreeable, and it didn't rain during the day.

That night, however, it did rain. We had two tents; the one that I was in alone stayed bone dry, the other that Gwen and Silas shared got pretty soaked. That put a damper on any plans to camp out the second night, but we did do the hiking that was on the docket for the day: Algonquin.

Gwen and Silas, top of Giant.

Me and Silas, Giant mountain. You can see the nice bowl behind us, and Chapel Lake.

Silas was two years ahead of me in high school, and was editor in chief of the Niskayuna Warrior when I was assisting Focus and when I was editing Sports. He actually ended up being on my floor at Courant, while he did his last year of PhD studies and I my first.

I'm dogged by coincidence.

Top of Giant mountain. There was a pretty nice view of Chapel Lake behind us, which was where the trailhead was. Clothes went on and came off a few times due to changing conditions and general overheatedness as we ascended. This is why I'm wearing entirely different things from the earlier photos, though this is in fact the same day.

Partway up Giant. This is about an hour, at most, from the summit. It started to be more bald here; the trees were very stunted and there was mostly alpine vegetation, which signs admonished us to keep off.

There was some nice terrain for scrambling up on hands and toes. A good, fun hike.

A toad I found on the way up Giant.

Lunch break on Giant mountain. This is maybe an hour or two into the hike.

Sara holding Makenna, Shawn holding Arianna.

The entire Fallon and Morrow clan.