last week

1. Drinks at Ayza.  Actually, wine and cheese and chocolate-covered strawberries at Ayza.  The Girls' Night Out deal is amazing - you get a free chocolate-covered strawberry and a free shot of chocolate martini each, which was a great deal (free is always a great deal, especially when it's free chocolate) and also accomplished the presumed goal of making me want to go back and buy a whole chocolate martini.  Also they gave us coupons for more free chocolate at their new location in the West Village.
2. Dinner at Bianca, a tiny, noisy Italian restaurant downtown.  Good food at very reasonable prices.  But I don't think I'd go back - it's far away, and while the food was good, the wine was bad, and the chocolate dessert was overly sweet and not sufficiently chocolatey (and I'm not one of those 80% dark chocolate freaks... it was a* dessert even a boy would like).
3. Brunch at Josie's with the parental units.  Turns out an organic diner on the Upper West Side is a very odd place to eat with parents. 
   
4. The ING NEW YORK CITY MARATHON.  This is the most awesome race ever.  Or at least I thought it was for the first half.  The level of enthusiasm at the start is astounding - the sheer size of the race, the fact that you're starting on this huge amazing bridge, the people around you who came from all over the world to participate in the event.  And then there's singing about America (they only do the anthem for the first start, I assume), and then the announcer says, "Marathoners, the city awaits you.  The world awaits you."  Which any New Yorker knows is two repetitions of the exact same thing.  And the gun goes off, and they play "New York, New York", and you're not moving yet because there are ten thousand people in front of you, but everyone's singing and dancing and just fidgeting to be off.  The first half of the race - entirely in Brooklyn - was just incredible.  I had no trouble with speed - in fact, I was so distracted by the scenery and the spectators that the miles just flew by - and the runners were all going at the same pace.  I hit the half at 2:30:19.  Then I had to make a pit stop and wait in a long line right around the halfway point, and that kind of broke the spell (and caused my muscles to tighten up).  I walked on the uphill of the bridge to Queens, and Queens itself felt kind of sloggy, and then I ran up the hill of the Queensborough bridge but when I got to the top I felt very unhappy.  Coming down the hill into Manhattan was supposed (according to others) to be the highlight of the race, but I was mostly filled with a sense of exhaustion and desolation.  First Avenue is really wide, and it seemed like this endless desert that I was going to have to run on for a zillion miles (actually only about four), and then run around in the Bronx, and then run all the way back.  This is where my mental game slipped, and around mile 17 or 18 I started taking longer and more frequent walk breaks.  Up until then I'd only been walking at water stations and the one bridge, but I took a few unscheduled walk breaks of varying lengths, and when I was running I was not running fast.  The worst part about all of this was really my attitude - I was not happy about the walking, and that made me unhappy about the race, and that made me feel more tired and want to walk more.  And then we got to the Bronx, which is basically just two bridges connected by a narrow stretch of featureless asphalt (seriously, I remember almost nothing about that borough, even though I think we were in it for two miles), and then back into the city.  I was toddling along, not happily but anyway not really getting any slower (at this point I was at a 14-15 mile pace, which is amazing because I was actually running about 3/4 of the time, which means my run was basically a very fast and inefficient walk).  Finally I got to the 23-mile mark, where a friend was waiting for me (all my other spectating friends had long ago gone home) and told me that, actually, I was not going to die on the course.  This gave me the energy to continue running, and from then on I didn't take any walk breaks except at the 24-mile water station.  In fact, I picked up my pace significantly for the last 1.5 miles (at least, it felt significant... in fact, I ran the last 1.2 miles in around 14 minutes so I was not exactly a speedster, but I'll take it) and finished feeling strong.  My chip time was 5:33:00, which is actually about two minutes faster than my long-ago Raleigh marathon time.  The most bizarre thing is, one day later, barely able to walk, I'm already planning my next race.