Tagged: NYC Runs

NYC Runs Runs Amok on Old Welfare Island

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On April 1, NYC Runs staged a ten-kilometer race on Roosevelt Island. Steve asked me to come over and take photos for this race, hoping that I would shoot photos from the Central Park Ekiden in February. After finally clearing a bunch of to-dos from my list, I have processed some of the photos from that day.

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I have to admit that these are not very great shots. During that weekend, I was not very mobile due to a painful ingrown toenail that hobbled me for the better part of a year. Consequently, I basically sat or stood in one spot and snapped shots as runners scurried past my camera. Most of the shots were of runners crossing the finish line. As a result, almost all of these shots are of runners reaching with one hand to turn off his/her stopwatch. The composition of most shots were similar, with the runner in the center of the frame, a consequence of relying on auto focus.

After I had shot the photos, Steve asked if there were any shots of the Manhattan skyline or of the tram. Unfortunately, because I shooting the runners crossing the finish line as I facing east towards Queens, most of the shots featured a power plant in Long Island City. Getting the tram would have been difficult, in any case, because I didn’t even see the tram while I was there. The only saving graces were a few shots of the Queensboro Bridge and of the FDR Drive in the background. I hope those help create a sense of the race’s location.

Anyway, I’m glad that my toe is feeling better and can move around.

NYC Runs and the Central Park Ekiden

New York City Ekiden

It’s been several months since NYC Runs held its first race in Riverside Park. As a favor for the organizer and figurehead, I snapped a bunch of photos of the Lousy T-Shirt Race. Since then NYC Runs has grown significantly. They even staged a pretty serious marathon in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park the weekend before Thanksgiving.

On Sunday, NYC Runs staged a Ekiden relay race in Central Park. Again, I brought my camera and shot photos of the relay race.

New York City Ekiden

Aside from the excitement of watching two- to four- person teams split the sixteen-mile course in Central Park, there was one funny moment. It was when one woman was trying to pass on her sash to her teammate. Unfortunately, she was wearing earphones and it came off with the sash. After a quarter minute or so, she managed to untangle the earphones from the sash but not before her iPod hit the pavement. There’s a lesson here, which I heard from many experienced runners: “don’t wear earphones in a race.”

If you stumbled here looking for your race results, check the NYC Runs Ekiden page for official information and results.

Lousy T-Shirt Race

Finish Line

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.