Another Windy One

Sunday 12/10, Run #97: Borough Park

Distance: 9.31 miles
Time: 1:10
Pace: 7:31
Temp: 38
Wind Chill: 28
Weather: sunny & windy

click on image for interactive map


Unique Miles Today: 7.71
Total Unique Miles: 758.56
Percent of Brooklyn Run: 43.54

For the complete route, click here

Notes: Today took me back down to Borough Park, the mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood just to the east of Sunset Park (where I was yesterday). I've run quite a bit down there already so I mostly know what to expect -- a lot of people out on the streets and sidewalks, scores of women pushing young kids in strollers (Borough Park has one of the highest birth rates in the city), and, of course, plenty of residential streets. In fact, there's a wide variety of housing on the streets I visited today, from older (but often quite handsome) six-story apartment buildings on 15th Avenue to rowhouses to semi-detached wood frame houses to a handful of enormous and apparently recently-built residences. A more commercial district is on 16th Avenue, with shops and bookstores and bakeries and a variety of other smaller businesses. And tucked away in the southern reaches of the neighborhood are a few streets -- 62nd and 63rd, especially -- with garages and small warehouses and light manufacturing (not so many people down there on a Sunday, but with the bright sunshine at an almost perfect oblique angle, there was a good number of interesting things to photograph). All in all another perfectly fine run, and if it started getting a bit warm near the end (the forecast high here is in the low 50s), it was balanced nicely by a blustery southwestern wind. It's always something.

In other running-related news, the Times ran this story in which some doctors question whether participating in marathons can actually cause heart damage in otherwise healthy individuals. Cited is the apparent rise in the numbers of marathoners who have literally dropped dead during a race (this happened to a woman my age a few years ago when I ran Chicago), though the researchers admit this might just be a statistical anomoly. I've run seven, and I know some of the regular readers here have quite a bit of marathon experience as well, so this is certainly some interesting reading. Not that any of us will stop running, of course.

Although Borough Park doesn't quite have the density of eye-grabbing photographic subjects that one can find in, say, Sunset Park or Bed-Stuy, I still managed to find at least a few things to point my camera at:


Former laundry(?) on 63rd Street


Books, tapes, and tefillin repair on 16th Avenue


One of the many older apartment buildings on 15th Avenue


Garage on 62nd Street


16th Avenue


Corner of 15th Avenue and 63rd Street