“No!” she said. “I just saw her come through!”
The parental unit on hand, who had inquired about any post-race medals that might be available as a keepsake, felt obliged to point out that his daughter had run at college. Geneseo.
“She won’t have heard of Geneseo,” Penelope, downstater by birth, upstater by choice, piped up.
“Oh, I know it, I went to New Paltz,” the timer, an affable, no-airs sort, responded, and thus a quick SUNY camaraderie manifested and was gone.
That medal, it should be said, might be the best this not-very-decorated runner has seen, depicting as it does a Pilgrim-hatted turkey swinging his fleshy waddle and somehow greeting his impending death by cleaver with bright-eyed joy.
Unlike, that is, that tom turkey from the old Warner Brothers cartoon, who protests in the barnyard as Thanksgiving approaches, “There are so many good books to read!”
Back to the race, what’s psychologically refreshing about Montauk’s is its circular nature, the big loop around Fort Pond, no retracing of steps, should you stick to the 3-miler, anyway.
“Trotters, unite!” a woman shouted from her lawn as she stood alone in a bitter Atlantic wind blowing across the rocky promontory that is her home hamlet.
Your correspondent, faithful, friendly, or otherwise, was not ready for prime time. For two months, all he could muster was a preparatory average of 1.5 runs per week.
Should you attempt this, what you will notice is the new phenomenon of the run-walk. There was a certain hay-haired and svelte 30-something clad in form-fitting brown spandex (not that I was looking) that I kept passing. Meaning she would pause her run, walk for a bit to recover, and then start up again, in that way apparently losing zero time, even gaining some, and hustling by me without my noticing in a repetition out of “Groundhog Day.”
I lost track of my unknowing competitor, but no matter, the temporal and cognitive dissonance was simply too much in all the pounding of pavement. Though the way things are going, next year I may be joining her. Step by step. Just like aging.