Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

This run was my first social engagement of the day - catching up with (another) old school friend who's doing the New York marathon in a couple of weeks. Once again this was in Central Park (and once again in the rain), swapping stories of the last decade or so, as well as more recent things like our respective travels (Kilimanjaro in his case) and his nephew who's starting to make his way in junior orienteering in Canberra (it occurs to me that it's at least theoretically possible that next year's ACT junior boys' team will consist entirely of people who are related to people I went to school with). It turned out to be a very nice run - probably the best I've felt on a run for several weeks - though tailed off a bit once I split off to go back to the hotel. It was a bit earlier in the morning than yesterday's run and there was plenty of traffic (and associated horn-blowing) towards the end of it. (It's surprisingly quiet early in the morning, though - New York may be the city that never sleeps but there aren't a lot of people around at 6.30, at least on the Upper West Side).

Next stage in the social calendar was breakfast with my old uni physics lab partner who works for Google (one can only imagine what it would look like in the Daily Telegraph if the staff food/coffee facility at Google turned up in any public sector organisation in Australia), before moving on to more of the sights of New York. The dismal weather was unhelpful here - certainly a waste of time spending $30 to go up the Empire State or the Rockefeller Center, and even the Staten Island ferry didn't have the views it would normally have because the windows were partly fogged up, but still offered a decent view of the Statue of Liberty. Still walked the length of Lower Manhattan from its southern tip as far as the Rockefeller Center (7-8k - Manhattan is big) and did some worthwhile exploring en route.

Now on the next leg of the trip to Rio. Getting through JFK wasn't the most relaxing airport experience of my life - partly because US airport security is rarely a pleasant experience, but mostly because the semi-automated check-in system, and the staff accompanying it, didn't seem to be able to cope with the idea that Brazilian visas have an issue date but no expiry date until you actually arrive in the country and kept insisting that my visa had expired; someone was essentially found who knew better. (It may be different for US citizens; Brazil makes something of a diplomatic point of matching its visa conditions for citizens of country X to whatever country X requires of Brazilians, and the onerous nature of US visa application procedures is a sore point in much of Latin America).