The days have been quite the same here at the beach–wake up, breakfast, beach, lunch on beach, dinner and hitting a few bars–so I really had nothing to say yesterday.
Saturday night we visited Lucy the Elephant. Lucy is a giant elephant in Margate that used to be a hotel and now is a major tourist attraction down here.
Yesterday we got pizza delivered to the beach.
(It’s really crowded.)
For dinner, we went to an Italian seafood place on the water called Baia. I started with a limoncello drink with limoncello and vodka. It was both sweet and strong, which is a sort of weird combination, if you ask me. I couldn’t drink more than one of these.
So for dinner, I switched to wine.
I usually can’t resist gnocchi or scallops on a menu, so when I saw both in one dish, I had to get it.
After dinner, we all headed out to the deck of the restaurant to hang out.
Not really the greatest pic, but I loved the little sparkling lights.
I would like my hair to do that without ocean water. (Or to just move to the ocean. Either would be great.)
Today’s beach lunch delivery was from a placed called Matteo’s, and I got a lobster roll. I felt kind of bad for the lobster and the lobster family he left eating it on the beach.
Since I’ve been here, I haven’t had many vegetables and I haven’t eaten very healthily, but my stomach seems to have calmed down. I don’t understand, but I’m going with it. Back to the beach!
For all the excitement and people in town for the race this weekend, you would think we were running a marathon or at least a half-marathon, but nope, just a 10K.
We went to Serafina because it was centrally located for both me and Ali and had a reservation available for a large group the day before–no other reason. With those low expectations, it was surprisingly not bad. I got the gnocchi with tomatoes. Lizzy and Becky were staying with me and we came back after dinner and went to sleep pretty early to wake up for the race.
We all met up in front of the Time Warner Center pre-race.
The Mini 10K starts in Columbus Circle and goes up Central Park West to 92nd before entering the park there. I ran it last year, too, and both years the corrals were packed. It’s a women’s-only race, which is sort of cool. This was the 40th year the race had been run. It was founded in 1972 by Fred Lebow, who also founded the NYC Marathon. He had wanted to host a “mini marathon” just for women, and named it after the miniskirt because they were in fashion then.
I’ve been running a little less in the past few months because I felt burned out after all those half-marathons, so I wasn’t expecting much yesterday. After my crappy experience at the Healthy Kidney 10K, I just wanted a decent race. I decided to rock out with headphones so that I could block out everything on my mind. As I’ve been getting faster lately, I’ve been getting a little bit cocky and I seem to always go out too fast now. I used to be really good with pacing myself to go out slow and then give a big push closer to the end. I did my first mile at 8:45 despite trying to keep it slow. I was feeling strong and thought maybe I’d continue to feel that way and get some epic PR. While I never hurt too much, I also didn’t keep that pace up. I couldn’t remember whether my 10K PR was 57:00 or 58:00, so I decided to pretend it was the lower one and shoot for that. (Turns out it was 58:00.) I took two margarita shot bloks at mile 3 and one more at the start of mile 5 to give me the push I needed to get to the end. As I started mile 5, I thought maybe I could finish in under 56:00, but I ended up finishing in 56:51, a 9:10 pace (or an 8:57 pace according to my watch, which said I ran 6.35.)
Afterwards, we went to Whym for a blogger breakfast organized by Christy.
Beer at 10am? Why not?
Lizzy and Becky
I got one of the breakfast specials–salmon and cream cheese on pretzel bread with sweet potato fries. It was good but really salty. (Or maybe it just tasted so salty because I was so dehydrated from running in the extreme humidity.)
Afterwards, Becky and Lizzy and I came back to my apartment and crashed for a few hours before going to meet up with Tina and Mal and some of their friends at Barrow Street Ale house. I don’t have any pictures, but we drank beer. You know what beer looks like.
