Scotland Run

Last Saturday morning I perfectly commemorated my one year anniversary of moving to New York by joining nearly 8000 runners in the Scotland 10K Run!

It was a slightly chilly morning in Central Park waiting for the 8am start but as usual there wasn't the same wind you get back home in North-East Scotland so it turned out to be ideal for racing.
I did need a hot chocolate to wrap my hands round on the train ride home though.

The goody bag you got with the race number pick-up contained a saltire hat and a guide to various running events in Scotland.

Took a chance on my lighter weight Inov8 shoes and they were fine and light for a one-off race but I'd go back to my Saucony Kinvara for training or longer road races.
Enjoyed a slightly mangled version of Flower of Scotland before the start and Alex Salmond wishing us good luck.

Plenty of kilts in action © NYRR

As a New York Road Runners member they have one of my previous race pace times down as 6.42 so I had a reasonable starting coral but it still took at least 3/4 of a mile for the narrow-ish park road to clear enough that I didn't have to waste so much energy concentrating so hard on not running into people, trying to pass others and avoiding the banner tape on one side and the angled gutter on the other.
Thus, mile 1 was easily my slowest at 7.00, whether this is good in terms of forcing me to go off slower I've still to discover.

They had bagpipers before the race and also near each mile there was a lone piper. It did make me mildly homesick for a second, even though it's not like you encounter bagpipers during your regular day, unless you work around the Royal Mile or Edinburgh Castle I guess.

© NYRR

The course was a clockwise (for a change) circuit of Central Park and has a couple of slight hills. My splits after the first mile were 6.40, 6.27, 6.36 then combined with a slight downhill to the south east corner and the run to the finish, 6.17 and a 6.15. I was pretty pleased with my 40.38 finish time and training is going well for the Bear Mountain Half Marathon in May.

© MarathonFoto.com

© 2013 SmugMug, Inc.

I just happened to get dressed in blue and white that morning!
I finished in 330th and 50th in my age group. The winning times were a speedy 30.17 for the men and a course record 33.22 for the women!

Afterwards there were a few little tents with various Scottish based stuff including a Glasgow based band.

© NYRR

Partly due to the chilly weather the freebie race hats were out in force and the sea of blue and white combined with all the Scottish flags in the area was a nice sight.

As usual you're all done and dusted by 9am and get to have that nice feeling of walking through the park and a few blocks to the train when it's nice and quiet out on the streets. You very quickly become a typical New Yorker when you live & work here..... bloody tourists getting in the way!

Above and Beyond

REI has been on Forbes Magazine's annual list of the 100 best companies to work for since they started their list in 1998.
The pay might not be super great and the hours a bit sketchy sometimes but they do offer some great benefits and also try and make sure their employees strike that live/work balance.

I had been tasked with tidying up the footwear warehouse over the last month and now it's probably as good as it's gonna get! Anyway, I was getting some good praise and today was given a gift:

Pretty good eh?

Working the High Line

As an outdoor company, REI likes to give back to the outdoors by conserving and protecting various natural spaces, working with local communities and volunteer groups.
As such, they like their workers to sign up to some of the volunteer projects the store gets involved with in the New York area. One such project that at least I had an interest in seeing as we have enjoyed visiting there on numerous occasions was the Spring cutback on the High Line garden.
The High Line is the park built on a one mile section of the former elevated New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side Line, which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan.

We learned that the High Line’s plants are not trimmed back at the onset of cold weather in the fall but instead the landscape is left intact throughout the winter and as spring arrives, Friends of the High Line staff and volunteers work together to cut back the plants to prepare for the new growing season.
More than 100,000 plants are trimmed back during this process.

Here we are getting our instructions:

Photo by Liz Ligon

After our volunteer date was rained out for two weeks in a row the third and final day was a perfect Spring day.

Photo by Liz Ligon

Working with Heather, one twisted and one cut. Then we used fine trimmed and raked up. Easy.
Oh, and tried really hard not to step on anything that we shouldn't be stepping on!

It will be good to come back to the same area later in the year once everything has bloomed and we can be proud to say, hey, we did that.... little bit there.

Photo by Liz Ligon