I'm working late tonight (in the endless, evil cycle of making bugs, fixing them, submitting tickets to test the fixes, waiting for the tickets to be picked up, and discovering that I've made some different bug), but I don't mind so much because every night this week I've left extremely early (by which I mean 6:15, 6:30, and 5:15(!)).  What did I do with these hours and hours of freedom?

1) Pilates.  I've done pilates before.  During grad school, I did exercise videos or DVDs most days, and I had a pilates-lite (crossed with aerobics, very weird) DVD that I did as a sort of rest.  I went to one or two pilates classes a couple years ago.  And I've occasionally done a set of 10-minute pilates workouts (that you can do, like, one every hour so you don't get too tired).  So I knew it would be hard, but it was really really really hard.  Like, at one point, I was shaking.  And it goes on for an hour.  What I found interesting was that the tone of the class I went to a couple times a couple years ago, which I'd thought was peculiar to that instructor, was replicated almost exactly in this class.  A sort of mocking chumminess.  Maybe it's a pilates thing.

2) No spin class.  Spin class was cancelled due to the gym being locked.  It was very sad, but I did get to go to another gym.  And starting today, I can go to any gym I want because my employer approves of fitness.

3)  Book club!  The book this month was Girl in Translation.  Three of us read it and found it thought-provoking.  We met at Bar Veloce, a Chelsea standbye, which was as I remembered it - expensive and right above the train tracks.  We talked about the fact that a fourth book club member is getting married next weekend, and what we should wear.

4) The Wall Street Run, which is, as per its name, a run on Wall Street.  Actually it's a three-mile run in the financial district, for which they have to close a number of narrow streets that are probably usually choked with cars and taxis.  It seemed like every bank, hedge fund, insurance agency, newspaper, and hospital in the city, plus Fresh Direct and the NYPD Bomb Squad, had a team.  It was kind of cool, having 12,000 people who don't usually race take over downtown Manhattan on a Thursday afternoon.  And then the race started and I realized that "people who don't usually race" translates to "people who have no idea how fast they are going to run and therefore start in the eight-minute-mile corral even though they can only run for three minutes at a time".  But it was still kind of cool, because we went all around the financial district and finished on the water, and they did a good job providing us with water and fruit and Jenny Craig snacks (I ate two of them as my pre-race snack, because I tend not to be very good about eating sufficiently when I'm at work, and probably the whole point of these snacks is that you are meant to eat only one and then nothing else for twelve hours.).  

After the race I ran home, which was 5.25 miles.  There's something really awesome, to my mind, about traversing large chunks of the city on foot, and going from one place to another when you thought of those places as being disconnected.