Summer Recap

Apparently the summer heat makes me to lazy to post anything up here all summer long. This has to be the hottest summer I can recall in the 9 years I've lived in NYC. A combo of the brutal heat/humidity plus work being especially insane the last couple months means my mileage has suffered a bit. Also, the fact that I am not running a fall marathon probably doesn't help me with my motivation too much. I've had my biggest lag in my long runs. Once the weather turns and I get settled in Chicago (oh yeah, i'm moving halfway across the country in 3 days....another thing that can reduce your mileage temporarily), i plan on getting back into a good schedule.

Anyways, heat aside, the summer was not without it's merits.
Top 3 running moments of the summer.

1. Me and my roommate Danny went on a gargantuan of a trail run to the peak of Mt. Marcy, which is the highest point in New York State. The drummer of Danny's band, his family has owned a cabin in the Adirondacks for many years, so we went up to spend the weekend and with the primary goal of destroying that mountain...in a running sense. The roundtrip run from the cabin, to the peak of the mountain, and back was 18 miles. I am not well versed in trail running at all and rarely have the chance to do it, give that I live in brooklyn and don't own a car, but to put it into perspective, if we were doing an 18 mile run on the roads of brooklyn, it would likely take us between 2-2.5 hours. To do the same distance up a mountain that the trails rarely actually resembled a trail, well, it took us 5 hours and 20 minutes. Another way to put it into perspective, this mountain is a popular destination for hikers, but they often take 2 days to hike to the top and back. It was easily the toughest run I have ever done, and also one of the most satisfying. We left going with only a water bottle and a total of 6 power gel packs between us. We just filled to water bottle at fresh streams (which we later learned was pretty dumb of us to do, but we came away unscathed). Our biggest mistake though was not bringing enough to eat. We freaked out many hikers when they saw two shirtless dudes with no packs running past them. The view from the top is unbelievable. One of the most beautiful landscapes I have had the pleasure of witnessing. Naturally, after this monster run, we spent the rest of the day drinking beer and swimming in the ice cold river.

2. Top summer moment #2. I ran my first actual, organized 5K race since the old cross country days of high school this summer. It was one of the Al Goldstein Summer speed series sponsored by the Prospect Park Track Club, of which I am a member. After not having run a real 5k race in about 14 years, I really had no clue what to expect. Since most everything I do now is longer distances, I don't have as good of a sense of pace for the shorter, speedier races. I ended up running the 5k in 17:14 though! Out of curiosity, a few weeks after the race I was back in Illinois at my parents house, and I uncovered my old high school cross country results and was schocked to discover that in my whole high school running career, I only ran one race at a faster pace then I did the 5k this summer! I could have sworn high school matt frey would mop the floor with 31 year old matt frey.

3. Top summer moment #3, one day about a week ago, me and danny were having a hard time figuring out what to do for a run. For fun we decided to just run down to the track in red hook, and run one mile as fast as we can, then just very slowly jog home. Well, much like the aforementioned 5k, I have done plenty of mile intervals on the track for speed work in the last couple years, but I hadn't actually run a single isolated 1600 meters for time since my high school track days. Back when I was 17, I peaked with a p.r. of 4:35. i don't have any aspirations of doing the necessary speedwork to get back down there, and would rather focus my time these days to improving my marathon and half marathon times, but I really wanted to see if I still could break 5 minutes. I ended up doing it this day in 4:59! I couldn't believe I still had a sub 5 mile in me. it gave me an awesome level of personal satisfaction.

That's the summer update. In 3 days I move to chicago which will be amazing and I will have to discover a whole new set of places to run and loops to set for myself. It will be sad to say goodbye to any form of hill training though, as chicago is as flat as flat can be, but we'll see how that affects me in boston next year!

Also, how come there are so many comments to my old posts on here that are written in chinese? Say what?