I have a friend that says often enough that is there was a nuclear attack, I’ll be the only thing left along with the cockroaches. That does not seem fun but thanks? I guess…? 
I heard that enough times that I had to give it a thought.

I do like that I tend to need less things every day (not common anywhere, less so for a newyorker).

I believe in minimalism in every aspect. It works for me. Less IS more. You live with what you have around, and the less you have, the better. I think my only talent is that I have a really good survival instinct; it dictates all my decisions and it helps uncomplicate life and shed the unnecessary. I am not even talking “natural” or “minimalist”, follow your primal instincts!

You all know my heart attack story. I went the way no pills and surgery, thank you, I’ll do my running thing and we’ll see. I had no idea what I was doing but thanks, survival instinct! My decisions seem crazy sometimes, but it’s all about going back to basics and/or moving forward.
It works, we keep at it; it doesn’t work, we move away. Simple. There is really not much more. In a way, it is survival of the fittest. The simpler the better.

I eat what I have around, or what my body tells me to, whatever that means, why overly-complicate things? I would really survive on anything because my body has adjusted to anything I throw at it. It’s evolved into a “this is what we do now” machine and has learned to roll with the punches. This applies to food, running, work, relationships, running shoes, you name it! 
You see some serious elite runners racing with no gps, or train without fueling. It CAN be done, but can we? The more I ask of my body (whether that’s something good or bad), the better it responds. The faster it adapts. The higher the evolution.

Listen to your primal needs, follow your survival inst instinct, shed the complications, your body will toughen up and there will be less stress. One of most basic things I learned is that a happy runner is always a better runner.

if there is a choice, PRIMAL is better.

Ugh. I still need to wake up. I think it will take a few days…

This was scheduled to be one of my busiest weeks of the year… if you had seen my calendar you’d think I had cloned myself. In between work, coaching, and all the marathon related things, I was ready to go full swing since last week.

But it wasn’t meant to be huh?

Saturday things started to slow down and shut down. I did my run around 3 pm and it was getting cloudy and windy. Sunday people started leaving the city. My run was uneventful, though there really was a strange wind in the air. The trains and buses all scheduled to shut down at 7 pm, so we would all stay indoors. It took me a bit to decide where to hunker down, but all I’ve learned in my years here is that the Upper East Side is usually the place with the least issues, so I stayed.

I did no prep. Sunday night was quite quiet.

Monday morning, I was starting to get antsy. I don’t usually stay for so long in my apartment (I wish I had time to do this more often!), and it felt stoopid to be so secluded: no rain or wind just yet. All bridges and tunnels were closed.

At 5 or 6 pm it started raining and it got windy. People started losing power. Lights were flickering. Triple high tide was bringing up loads of water up the south of the city, Battery Park, etc. The Hudson and the East River were coming up into the city soon.

Train station, water above the platform. This is obv, not my picture!

I took my flashlight out, organized the apartment, took my two mp3 players out and found radios I could listen to if lights went out, candles ready, headlamp on, and iphone constantly plugged in to be at 100%.

Lights kept flickering. River came up to First Avenue, 120 meters from where I was. Soon, everyone below 30th st was out of power, along with some of Brooklyn and Queens. Around half the city, a third of a million people without power. In the UES, people were still walking their dogs. Morons.

The Empire State Building was all left with power downtown. Like a beacon of hope or something poetic.

Then I heard wild noises from the tree outside whipping into my window, I got scared for a bit and considered moving my bed. Eventually, when the wind died down, and we figured the worst of the storm had passed, I was ready to pass out. Like a bad dream that needed to be over.

 

This is gonna be one tough week. And it’s marathon week. It’ll take a bit for the airports to open, for the trains to work, and for First Avenue (some 4 miles of the marathon run on it) and the rest of the course to be cleared up. With half the city with no power and no trains it will be hard to get marathon week moving, but… this is NYC. It’s sunny out now.

What a mess, Sandy. Did you have to visit this week?

Today I remembered something I never think about. This feeling happens only for a few seconds, some very slow but fleeting seconds, just once or twice a year. And I never remembered it, until now. It was more like a tiny memory deja-vu. 

Marathons… take a lot of planning. You sign up about a year before. You get a hotel, a flight, or not, you decide when you’ll start training, start building a base, a few months before you officially start training. You then start the road to get you to the start, you do your runs, you measure your weekly, and monthly mileages, you plan when you’ll do tempos, speed, long runs and how much of them. You build up, you taper, a week or two before, more macro planning, race fueling, gear, weather panic, pace, course strategy, etc.

The days before are… full of stuff to do, full of emotions, good luck wishes, to-do lists, phone calls, checking the weather obsessively, outfit options, etc… You wake up on race day, have your morning meal, hydrate, do your business, gear up, all of it, get to the start, see people, get nervous, get excited, leave the phone, walk into the corral, usually in throaway clothes, nervous chatter, we’re all pumped and ready, the cannon… And that’s when it usually happens. My stomach sinks.

I get a second of vacuum. It’s like you can’t breathe. 

The Abyss.

There is a deep realization that all the chatter stops here.This is the moment when I jump; there will be a long fall and I alone have brought myself there and there is no stopping it and no backing down.I am in front of a a bottomless blind hollowness and I have to jump. IN. No way back now. I breathe in, I see the long space ahead, and I know I have to jump. I know it’s gonna hurt, and I know there will be no net to spare me the pain. And I picked this. There is no one there to help you. There is no sound, no words of “it’ll be fine”, nothing can save you. Air tight vacuum. I breathe in. A bit of panic. A bit of Air. A bit of courage. A bit of wondering if I can really do this one more time. I breathe in. Very little air. The long long road ahead until we can breathe. 

And I jump.

A few seconds later, the sounds come back, the running gets my blood moving, the air rushes in and fills me up with the joy of running and and how lucky I feel to be embarking into another 26.2 long adventure, and I feel  fine for a while.

At the Edge of the Precipice

There seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel