Firecracker!

After beating myself up a bit on Saturday, competing in two fairly long races, here I was preparing to compete again on Monday (Independence Day). I'd committed to picking up another blogger The Thinking Runner at an area train station, so I headed off a bit early to get him. (While there are stations closer, here in NJ, the train lines are rather like spokes on a wheel, with New York City as the hub, so by picking him up there, it may well have saved him an hour or more, since he's on a different spoke.)

I'd determined to run this one pretty comfortably. I was a bit surprised by Thinking Runner's prowess. He's a graduate student, spending the summer here in NJ, and plans to run the Chicago Marathon this fall with hopes of qualifying for Boston. He ran the race pretty hard and just crushed me, causing me to joke to him that "I wouldn't have invited you if I knew you'd beat me." Actually, I'm a proponent of having lots of strong runners around - having someone on my shoulder generally squeezes a better race out of me. I am amazed by the guys who can run a race solo and put up a really good time - their ability to focus on maintaining intensity must be extraordinary.

This race gives some astonishingly large awards - to the point of being too large. The winners got trophies that were about 4 feet tall. The second place awards were a much more manageable 2 feet. I'm a friend of the second place guy, and he and his dad were planning to "shrink" the trophy by removing some parts.

They also have some amusing "competitive" awards to fill time. One of them was to be "woman with the best arms," my wife, who's a trainer was going to go up with a friend of hers who's a masseuse, but when the women's race winner, a former competitive bodybuilder went up, it put the kibosh on that.

After the race, I shared a beer with some running friends, then got Thinking Runner back to the train and we both got on with our day.