Rain, 5:30 am in Central Park but Negative Splits

Wednesday morning at 5:30 am the New York Road Runners Club celebrated its 50th Anniversary with a five-mile run in Central Park. There were about 5,000 runners there, before dawn, huddled under trees and crowded into the Tavern on the Green's tent trying to get out of a torrential but not terribly cold rain. No one griped, no one kvetched and we all got into the starting pens and ran hard through the puddles around the park.

The picture (above) is from the NYRR website and I'm sitting about two thousand runners back, still waiting to start moving well after the race started.

Last Name	First Name	Sex/ Age	Bib	Team	City	State	Overall Place	Gender Place	Age Place	Finish Time	Pace/ Mile	AG Time	AG Gender Place	AG %
GOREE	LANGSTON	M54	3226		NEW YORK	NY	964	667	40	43:23	8:40	36:40	420	58.0 %

I had a good race with nicely negative splits.

Mile 1: 11.2 Km/h (9:05)
Mile 2: 11.2 Km/h (9:04)
Mile 3: 11.6 Km/h (8:49)
Mile 4: 11.9 Km/h (8:33)
Mile 5: 12.9 Km/h (7:51)

By 6:30 am, we were done.. race was over. I unchained my bike and rode home, sopping wet as the city was still waking up. How crazy is Manhattan? It is only NY where you can get 5,000 people to gather before the sun comes up ... and then everyone scatters, back into their workaday lives, just as quickly as they all came together. A lovely June morning in Manhattan!