Summer Summer Summer Summertime

Ok, the weather kinda sucks lately. I get that. But we only get one summer a year and I practically lived at work through June and July, so I'm making the most out of this August, come rain, shine or ridiculous humidity.

I was away for the first Saturday of Summer Streets, but made it to the last two. If you didn't get to check it out this year, mark your calendars for next year. Park Ave. gets closed off to traffic from 72nd street down to the Brooklyn Bridge. You can walk, run, bike, blade, skateboard ... or whatever. There are free bike and rollerblade rentals available. Along the route there are little tents with water (kudos to the Kitano hotel for the excellent, very cold water and to Equinox for the little water bottles), coffee, cheese (seriously) and silly photo ops. This weekend I may have been out too early, but last weekend there were dance and musical performances. Apparently, Crunch was offering aerobics classes along the way, too.

For my first Summer Streets experience, I went rollerblading with a friend. It turns out that Park Ave. is not so flat. I'm a big fan of going uphill, but downhill scares me. I know that speed and momentum give you greater control, but my brain and my body seem to have a disconnect on the issue. The spookiest part was heading uptown around Grand Central. You go past that Hyatt and then you're in a curvy tunnel going downhill. I rode my break pretty hard.

That was the first day of the heat wave, so I was very impressed by the number of people running and biking. I was even more impressed by the very perky people telling you when to stop for traffic. I don't know how they did that for 5 hours.

Yesterday, I wanted to run Summer Streets, and my sister and cousin invited me to run with them. While neither is actively training for a race right now, both are marathoners. Until yesterday, I don't think I'd ever run more than 7.5ish miles (from my apartment to the park, around the loop and back). They were talking about an 8 mile run. That sounded good. I'll be doing my first half in March, and while it's too early to train, it can't hurt to push it a bit.

It wasn't quite as hot as the previous weekend (it was pretty early in the day) but it was raining. The rain actually felt pretty good until I stepped in a puddle and my sneakers got all wet. Oops!

We ended up running from 72nd and Park down to more or less the Brooklyn Bridge and back. According to mapmyrun.com, that's about 9.2 miles. Go me! I more or less kept up with the fam for the first few, but after a while, I fell behind. I'm slow. I also have little legs.

Those little legs are a tad sore today, but survived an advanced Physique class, so I've got no complaints.  What will the rest of the week bring?  I'll keep you posted.

-Gym Belle-