Cowboy Hazel

This year's NYC Marathon was quite a bit different than 2010 for me… a lot less running and a lot more photo taking.

The cool thing about working for a running magazine was that I had a very legitimate reason to head into the city for marathon weekend. So, I caught a bus Wednesday after work and stayed with Helen through Monday morning.

I spent Thursday and Friday at Rodale's NYC offices, but snuck in a couple fun field trips. We stopped by the expo on Thursday, when Lauren Fleshman was at our booth, and got her to autograph a copy of the magazine. Super cool. Friday morning, I headed over to the press tent at Tavern on the Green and saw RW's Amby Burfoot receiving the George Hirsch Journalism Award.

Saturday was another busy day. We had the Puma shakeout run in the morning down at the Javits Center, so Helen ran with me down there. After that, I hustled it back uptown. My plan called for 5 miles at 6:05/mile, but I couldn't quite hit that. Blame the wind, blame the bulky jacket I was wearing, blame my legs. I did get in four-and-a-half at around 6:20/mile in the midst of 15 total, though, so it wasn't a total fail. Back to midtown for a meeting about the Shoe Finder and then to the Javits Center again where a few coworkers and I (the "experts" panel) answered questions for a hundred or so runners. I'm not a huge fan of public speaking, generally, but that went as well as I could have hoped. I wasn't as lively as some of the other speakers, but I'm hoping practice will make perfect there.

On the day of the race, Helen and I headed out to 119th & 1st and met up with Antonio, his parents, and his sister. Jeff had let me borrow his fancy camera and I was shooting photos for an RW online slideshow. Unfortunately, simply having a fancy camera on hand isn't enough to get great photos, but I managed to get a few decent ones out of the 500 or so that I shot. As soon as the elite men raced by, we hurried over to 5th Avenue to catch them again. And, not too long after that, all the friends we were watching for started to run by. It was fun getting photos of them. The rest of the day was unglamorously spent making slideshows, converting live coverage, etc. from Helen's kitchen table. Not nearly as exciting as being out on the course, but all part of it…

There is so much energy in New York during marathon weekend that it's almost impossible not to want to go run a marathon yourself. Lucky for me, I have Philadelphia coming up in just a week and a half.