The Diva Factor

(Staten Island Ferry Vista August 15, 2009)

This is an email from me to my old friend Bryan. He and his wife happened to be in New York City at the same time as my boyfriend Paul and I were. While we were successful in completing the NYC half-marathon (the reason for our visit), we had no success reaching them by telephone. I was still in a post-race rant haze apologizing for this oversight a day later:

"I'm so sorry we didn't get a chance to call. For one thing, it's crazy trying to find a functional pay phone in NYC -- we had very marginal luck with this, and couldn't really find free wifi. And, if the call isn't local, it's even more mayhem as we discovered. The race was super fun, though the logistics were a bit of a nightmare: not enough water (don't get me started on that), very few potty places, no pace bunnies (and they apparently ran out of medals at the end -- everyone is supposed to get one). The swag wasn't very good either: a t-shirt a some yucky lip balm. BUT, it was still great: the route was awesome, though at various points there was the competing urban stink of excrement and garbage and geez urine too. Oh well. That's not the fault of the organizers, though, and the volunteers were very nice. We ran slowly and for a very long time. I finished in 2 hours 42 minutes and P's time was 2:40. Paula Radcliffe, the person who won, finished in under 1 hour 9 minutes...(!) Now I'm dealing with a bit of chafe around the waist -- WTF? who knew???? Anyway. On Saturday night we went to the free Martha Wainwright dance thing at Central Park -- it was totally wonderful. We experienced the M-60 Bus through Astoria to LaGuardia airport -- all of the passengers were like t.v. characters -- kind of unreal. And then, we were detained by customs in Montreal. Apparently, suspicion is raised if you don't actually buy anything. Again, the learning curve of the weekend was pretty high. We spent a lot of time on public transport and we even did the Staten Island Ferry! So that was our weekend.

I hope you're enjoying yourselves. See you in Montreal."