Running Announcement

Read the first part of my US Open recap here.

Since the rest of my recap is moot now that the Open is over and Federer lost, I will quickly show you some pictures I took:

Ahh. Nice. I will spare you the photos of Federer sitting in his chair on the side of the court.

I am excited to go back next year on a weekend and have more time to walk around and see side matches and maybe not freeze like I did this year, and maybe get to stay for the entire thing and not have to leave early since the game goes on past midnight.

🙂

Some randomness going on in my life these days:

I took a free memoir writing class at Gotham Writers’ Workshop last night and basically fell in love. I learned some great things in just that one hour and, as they hoped when offering these free classes, I now am obsessed with the idea of taking a full workshop. Sara Barron, who wrote a hilarious book that I love called People are Unappealing, teaches the comedy writing workshop. The only thing that is stopping me from signing up right now is money. It’s not even expensive at all for what it is, they offer fantastic prices there. But, it is still more than I can swing right now. There is a one day full-day course of the same topic I could take, but I have to go to a wedding on that day. Maybe in the Spring I will take a workshop. For now, I am excited for anything free they offer — including the free Dialogue Writing class I am taking next week!

Expect to see more dialogue in this blog after that.

I am reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I am finally getting to the good stuff. It took me awhile to get past the history of corn but I hope to have a full review of this along with In Defense of Food for you within the next few weeks.

For the longest time I didn’t understand Twitter but now that I started to actually use it and understand it better, I LOVE IT. I think Twitter just might be my favorite of the social networking sites. I love how information is immediate and accessible and how you can feel like you are friends with celebrities or companies with it. I feel like Jill Zarin and the guy who played Kryten in Red Dwarf are speaking only to me when they tweet.

Confession: Although I strive to live a healthy lifestyle, I have one dirty little secret. That secret is bread pudding from the dessert bar at Whole Foods. HOLY YUM that stuff is amazing. Amazing to the point where every time I am at Whole Foods by the buffet I can’t NOT get a little bit. And the confession gets worse . . . I usually go to Whole Foods on my way into work in te morning. I usually have a tiny bit of bread pudding for breakfast multiple times a week. 😐 The best days are when it is extra mushy, like pure pieces of mush. Those are days it really melts in your mouth. Bread pudding is dessert french toast. I even complimented the dessert chef at the TriBeCa Whole Foods personally. Whole Foods is evil.

My old blog template did not support bulletpoints for some reason. They just wouldn’t work, even if I manually typed in the code. That resulted in some stupid looking blogs. I was excited to realize in this post that I do have use of bulletpoints, but I found out today I am unable to make spaces between each bullet. My point is, expect to see more bullets but not as many as I’d hoped, and not when I have paragraphs to bullet.

And finally, my running announcement. As you might know, I am very new to running. I wanted to do it and then couldn’t — I had knee pain, hip pain, felt overall awful when I tried. At one point I said “running is just not for me.” And then I tried again and ran for 25 minutes and felt pretty good. Ever since then I have been slowly and steadily improving, and over the last weeks I ran two 5K races (here and here). Well, as some of you predicted, I have officially caught the racing bug. All I want to do is run in more races, and I am already dreading the winter (treadmill, blech) and looking forward to the spring when I can know I will have months of outdoor running and races.But — race season is not over yet! And after some research I decided to register for two more races this year! On September 26, I will run in the Continental Airlines 5th Avenue Mile, a 1 mile timed race that begins on 80th and 5th and runs right alongside Central Park to 60th and 5th, just a few blocks from my apartment. I am excited to push myself hard in a short run to see how I do!

I wanted to challenge myself in a longer run as well, as I have never run more than about 3 and a half miles at a time. So the next race I signed up for is the Poland Spring Marathon Kickoff, a 5 mile timed race in Central Park on October 25 that ends at the same finish line as the NYC Marathon! I have never ran 5 miles before so this will be a real challenge. I created a training schedule loosely based off Hal Higdon’s 10K Novice training plan, which I am attempting to follow as best I can. It hasn’t been so spot on, but I am doing my best and as long as I get my long runs in I will be fine.

Have any of you ever tried something you never thought you’d do and ended up getting really into it?

I am so excited!