runs brooklyn/brooklyn runs: An Uneventful Run (with Unexpected Speed)

Friday 11/10, Run #81: Midwood, Marine Park, Flatlands

Distance: 9.38 miles
Time: 1:05
Pace: 6:57
Temp: 58
Dewpoint: 42
Weather: sunny & windy

click on image for interactive map

Unique Miles Today: 7.84
Total Unique Miles: 637.53
Percent of Brooklyn Run: 36.59

For the complete route, click here

Notes: It's becoming a bit of a pattern. If I have a particularly interesting run on any given day, with much to see and photograph and discuss on these pages, it will more likely than not be followed almost immediately by an outing noteable mostly for its very uneventfulness. This is to be expected, I suppose (some kind of statistical averaging-out principle at work, no doubt), and it's not entirely unwelcome, since visually stimulating and otherwise exciting runs entail more work, more stopping and starting, and often much more complicated routes. So it's with more relief than resignation or regret that after yesterday's run -- replete with dozens of buildings and houses and streetside tableaux just begging to be photographed (not to mention my own appointment with a professionally-wielded lens) -- today's run was much more, well, pedestrian. And that was just fine with me, since I managed to finish up all of Marine Park today. Another neighborhood complete!

That's not to say there was nothing to look at, or that my retinas were somehow rendered useless and inert for sheer want of external stimulation. But I was able to focus more on my running than on taking pictures or whatever. And that's okay with me since this whole project, after all, is ostensibly about running. In fact, without having to stop too often for pictures (and on a morning that was itself picture-perfect, weather-wise), I was able to concentrate a bit on form and efficiency and all that kind of technical thing, and the result was... that I ran a sub-seven minute pace? Yeah, well, I'm not sure I completely believe it, either. I knew I was moving quickly and that I'd turn in a good time, but 6:57? To the best of my ability to figure such things, though, this is what it was, so I'm (ahem) running with it. Whether this was a fluke, a miscalculation somwhere on my part, or real, tangible improvement in my running will probably make itself evident in the next week or so (that is, if I'm able to walk). Stay tuned. I know I will.

I did, of course, stop to snap a quick picture now and then. Here are a few: