Congratulations to my friend Steve who staged his first NYC Runs race on Wednesday. The Lousy T-Shirt Race was a 5K in Riverside Park where about 100 runners came on a Wednesday night and raced around the park. The runners were a mix of pretty experienced and skilled runners, weekend warriors, and a handful casual runners for whom this was their first race. The premise behind the run was to poke a little fun at the t-shirts that one collects from doing races such as these. The shirts even read, “NYC Runs Put On Its First Ever And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!“

Despite the name, the t-shirt was anything but lousy. I should know because I was responsible for procuring and printing these lousy t-shirts, which were gender-specific American Apparel t-shirts in their own proprietary dark blue color called “Lapis.” Sarah and I printed the shirts over the weekend, and we delivered them yesterday a few hours before the race. The key was having a simple one color design on each side, and also having that one-color press I bought from some guy on Craigslist. Way to go!

NYC Runs plans to stage these races on a biweekly basis, and given that this was the first ever race, it went pretty well.