Weekend Chills and Thrills

I'll be in DC this coming weekend and will likely not be participating in any Halloween festivities, so I was particularly excited when Julia invited me to their pre-Halloween party last Friday night. I decided to keep it low key and dressed as a 12-year-old girl, complete with neon nail polish, rubber bracelets, and a _Twilight_-themed t-shirt. There were several girls there from Asian countries (Hong Kong, China, and Japan) who had never carved pumpkins before, so watching them dive into their first ones was pretty entertaining. I love stuff like that - really makes you question traditions you take for granted. I mean, whose I idea was it to cut faces in pumpkins in the first place?

How do you entertain a group of graduate students for next to nothing? Temporary tattoos. Julia provided sheets of them and we put them all over ourselves. The fang marks seemed appropriate for my costume, given my t-shirt.

On Sunday, Dave joined Seint and me at the climbing gym for a sweaty, exhausting, awesome afternoon. We all took turns belaying each other, then went out for dinner and drinks afterward. It was a great way to end a great weekend!

Belay on!

Seint lowers me down, and I make a mental note to clean my camera lens. Dave makes a mental note to hold the camera straight next time.

Fall Hike, or...

I considered many alternate titles for this post, among them "In Praise of Flexibility," "Turns Out Maps are Helpful After All," "Lost in Translation," and "Mental Health Day." At any rate, I decided I needed to get out of the city for a bit and, after consulting the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference's informative and thorough website, headed north yesterday on a train that traces the Hudson River. I caught it in Harlem and rode it for about an hour, ending at a stop called Garrison. The ride over was peaceful and the scenery was gorgeous. I think if, upon reaching Garrison, I'd simply gotten on another train and headed back to NYC I'd have called the day a success.

I began here,

rode by this,

and ended here. A pretty sweet trade.

I was relying on directions I'd copied from the NYNJTC website for a hike that went up Sugarloaf Hill and alongside Castle Rock. It was supposed to provide 7 miles of great views before looping back to the Garrison train station. Alas, I ended up having to take their word for it. The directions I was using were clear and explicit on the screen, but trying to apply them to a tangle of trails which criss-crossed and intersected merrily every hundred feet or so proved easier said than done. According to the directions, there is a trail south of the parking lot that leads to the trail head for the hike I had planned. I followed it, decided it was wrong, retraced my steps, went up several roads, decided they were all wrong, re-retraced my steps, and after 45 minutes ended up back in the parking lot again. Hmmm. Time to whip out the smartphone and find a map. My BlackBerry had other ideas, however. It lethargically loaded a few very unhelpful pages and didn't yield any maps, only services that would sell me a map of the area, which was not helpful.

Finally, I gave up the BlackBerry and headed back down the trail I'd originally started on. It was marked with blue blazes, which changed from blue to white to red to orange and back to blue again in rapid succession (or perhaps I wasn't following the same trail). I figured I'd just walk around for a while; even if I wasn't on the Sugarloaf trail, it was still a chilly, beautiful fall day and the woods were indescribably lovely. I wasn't worried about getting lost, as the Hudson was never too far away, and I knew I could always follow it back to Garrison.

Next time I go hiking in upstate New York, will bring a book of Robert Frost along with me. I had his poems running through my head just about the whole time I was out. This image made me think of "Mending Wall."

I saw only one other person during the hours that I walked around, a guy about my age who said a cheerful hello and continued on his way. I followed a series of trails until each of them ended because they ran into a peninsula or private property. It was a much-needed respite from New York City, and I had a fantastic time. It was a breezy day that couldn't decide whether it was going to be sunny or overcast, and the only sounds were made by leaves, crunching below my feet or rustling above my head. Every now and then my trail would spit me out on the banks of the Hudson, where I could look across the water at blazing fall trees and West Point looming rather ominously in the distance. I walked by burned, overgrown ruins of houses that the forest slowly taking back, all kinds of fungi, squirrels, birds, and even some intrepid wildflowers still hanging on. At one point a stream turned into a small waterfall. It was pure bliss.

West Point

One of the blazes marking one of the trails I followed.

I guess it's been a while since the blazes were affixed. This tree has grown attached it its blaze.

Bride over the railroad tracks

After I'd exhausted every hiking possibility, I sighed, not yet having had my fill of the outdoors, and headed back to the platform where I caught the next train back to Harlem. Back home, before even taking off my hiking boots, I ordered a set of trail maps of the East Hudson area and plan to head back as soon as they arrive to do this thing once and for all. I'm viewing yesterday as a fact-finding mission.

Rockin' Out

When I think about all the things I know, I'd guess they've come from a number of different sources: things I've read, classes I've taken, podcasts I've heard, interesting people I've talked to. I'm thinking about this because Miguel hasn't really had any of those experiences. He doesn't read much, because for much of his life he really couldn't; he was stuck in special ed classes that didn't teach him anything; he doesn't listen to podcasts because I don't think he knows how to download them; and he doesn't leave the house much, so his interactions with people outside his family are very . But he knows a lot about history, politics, etc. How? Answer: the guy's a TV junkie. He loves movies and cartoons, but he watches the news, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel, too.

Clearly television has been a good conduit for him, a window to the world to use a worn-out cliche. Something about the sound combined with the images must be making the information stick. I decided to combine this brainchild with my until-now clandestine love of Schoolhouse Rock cartoons. There's one on nouns, one on verbs, on one subject and predicate, adverbs, interjections, etc. I was taking a bit of a risk - I didn't want him to be offended that I was showing him a cartoon - but I'm getting a feel for his sense of humor and thought there was a good chance he'd love it.

He loved it. We watched the noun one yesterday as a review of the crash course I gave him on nouns during Monday's session. He said he might even go home and watch it again on YouTube! Of course, while I'm glad he enjoyed it, I'm hoping that the repeating chorus defining nouns ("Well every place that you can go/And every person you can know/And every think that you can show/You know they're nouns...I find it quite interesting/A noun's a person, place or thing." - who can resist?) will stick in his head and help to anchor the concept. Knowing nouns help him on grammar segment of the GED and in his writing, as it will enable him to check his sentences to be sure they're correct.

On Monday's agenda is the video on verbs. Rock on!

Being Accomodating

In my reckless, ignorant youth, I used to think of hotels when I heard the word "accommodations." That fragment of my innocence has fled, however. Now, "accommodations" has taken on a new and complicated meaning involving diagnosed learning disabilities, specialized classroom instruction, and standardized tests.

Learning disabilities can qualify students for a number of accommodations on tests. Some get extra time. Some get to type their answers. Some get a scribe to transcribe their responses for them. Some can have the entire test read to them. This seems sort of unfair at the outset, as it seems that some of these things would give disabled kids an unfair advantage. That's not the case, however. I read a study last year that investigated this issue and found that typically developing kids didn't do significantly better on standardized tests when they tested in the same conditions as their disabled peers. This makes sense to me: While I felt a bit rushed on some portions of the SAT, I don't think 50% more time would have improved my score much, and having someone read the test to me would have been excruciating.

On Saturday, I woke up early and headed to Churchill School on the Lower East Side. Every student at Churchill has some kind of learning disability (except that they call them "learning differences" there). It's a public school, but it gets a lot of parent donations and grant money and so it's a gorgeous facility with really outstanding instruction. Kids who go there generally have average and above-average intelligence coupled with pretty severe learning disabilities. Classes are small - 12 kids at most - and a huge part of the school's mission is to develop kids' extra-curricular talents in art, sports, etc.

I, and about 20 other adults, administered the PSAT to students with various learning differences which qualified them for various accommodations. My assigned student, a darling sophomore named John, got double the amount of time for testing, and a "reader" and "scribe" (me) to boss around. Of course he was very sweet about it and kept apologizing for making me read things over and over, and he didn't ask me to write anything for him. I read the entire test to him, item by item. Sometimes this meant reading long passages, sometimes it meant math problems. He wanted me to read each question and each of the possible answers. I read the titles of graphs and charts. I repeated sentences with different words inserted in blanks so he could determine whether they "sounded right." In all, we tested from about 8:45 until 1:15 with only about 9 minutes' worth of break time.

Friends I met with later that afternoon cringed when I told them about it, but I'd done this for Churchill once before and enjoyed it enough to come back for more. For one thing, the kids at Churchill are great, and I really enjoy getting to know them; if there's leftover time in one of the testing segments, we chat until the time is up and we have to move on. Also, it's really interesting to work with kids who are learning disabled but also highly motivated. It's a pretty uncommon combination, particularly by the time they're in high school, because they tend not to have gotten the right kind of instruction and are usually fed up with school by the time they're teenagers. And the money I made for doing this ain't too shabby, either.

The hardest part of the test is that you're not allowed to help the kids. It's incredibly tempting - you're alone in a room with them and no one would ever know. Both kids I've read for have had a terrible time with the test, and you have to keep your face blank while you watch them bubble in wrong answer after wrong answer. (I did my best to send telepathic messages to John, but apparently we were not on the same wavelength.)

John's vocabulary wasn't great and his language skills were terrible - every time I'd get done reading an especially wordy sentence, he'd groan "Oh my GOD!" - but he seemed to be decent at math. Alas for John, over half the questions in the math sections were tortuous and wordy. There were word problems and explanations about what would happen to y if x equalled some number phrase and the poor kid really struggled. To pass the time while he was trying to make sense of the problems, I worked through them myself in miniscule writing on a scrap of paper. Never a math student, I was rather pleased to find that 2/3 of the way through graduate school I finally seem to have a command of basic algebra skills.

More Surprises: Miguel's Reading/Writing Assessments

Receptive language is always easier than productive language. This is why you can't string together a single sentence you learned in your high school Spanish class, but you can flip past a commercial on a Spanish TV channel and get a vague idea of what they're talking about. In some senses, Miguel's assessment results fit this generalization, and in other ways they've got me totally perplexed.

Usually, I can nail a client's instructional level in oral reading, silent reading, and listening comprehension in under an hour. But I was shooting in the dark with poor Miguel. I handed him passage after passage, eventually using up our entire 90-minute session. (He was a very good sport about it, and when I thanked him at the end for his patience, he thanked me for mine.) I started him off with a sixth grade passage to read orally, just in case; I knew he could decode words at a higher level than that, but I wasn't sure what his comprehension skills were and didn't want him to totally bomb the questioning section at the end and get discouraged. Also, speed plays a huge part in comprehension, and I had no idea what kind of pacing to expect. Perhaps he'd use up so many cognitive resources decoding each painstaking syllable that he'd have no space left to think about what he was reading... I needn't have worried.

(As you're reading the results that follow, remember that this is a guy who could not read at all when he was 19.)

He blew through the sixth grade passage, and after giving him a harder one I decided he was instructional at the upper middle school level. Silent reading was a little lower, in part because I gave him an expository (nonfiction) passage. Since those are always harder, I started him at fifth grade, but that was too easy and so we went on to sixth grade and I decided that was a good place to stop for the moment. It's typical for a person's expository reading skills to be a grade level below their narrative reading skills.

Now on to the really surprising part: Miguel had demonstrated an excellent memory for things we'd talked about during our sessions. One major characteristic of someone with dyslexia, which is what he supposedly has, is excellent listening comprehension, which contrasts sharply with their subpar reading comprehension (oral and silent). So I chose a high school-level passage, the first part of a novel about a child's experience living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and read it aloud. It was about 2 1/2 pages long. At the end, Miguel couldn't rememberany of it. He couldn't answer a single comprehension question or tell me anything that he'd heard in the story. He told me everything he knew about Vietnam and the Vietnam War, which was a surprising amount, and was able to define words like "convoy." But he couldn't tell me anything about the plot, setting, or characters. He said he tried hard to listen... I jumped down to a sixth grade passage. He did better on that one, but it was about Abraham Lincoln, about whom he knows rather a lot, so I'm not sure if he was answering the questions from what he remembered about the passage or based on his prior knowledge.

All that had us both wiped out, so I save the writing assessment for the next session. After I watched him stare at the prompt he had chosen for a few minutes, I suggested a few prewriting techniques. He made a few notes (two), then slowly began to write, word by word. Although I assured him that spelling did not count, he still asked me to spell just about every other word for him. Some of them, like "encourage" were tricky, and others, like "used" were not. His finished product had good and bad qualities. It was only a few lines long and contained a lot of spelling errors, despite his using me as a human dictionary. There was no punctuation and maybe one capital letter. On the plus side, the position he was arguing was clearly stated at the beginning, and he provided two justifications for his opinion.

We had about half an hour left in the session, so after glancing at the essay I told him that the lack of capital letters and ending punctuation were the first things that jumped out at me. He had no idea what I was talking about. He recognized a period ("the dot," he said) but not an exclamation point or question mark. He could not recall every seeing them before! And he had no idea what any of them were used for. I can't even remember a time in my life when I didn't know what a question mark indicated. It's strange to think about. We went over that stuff for a while, then we did a quick crash course in capital letters. He couldn't tell me a single instance when one should use them. I pointed out that he'd correctly used capitals for the first letters of his first and last name when writing his name on the release forms during our first session and asked him why. He had no idea, and finally said he guessed it just looked better. After some more thought, he said he knew that capital letters always started sentences. Goodness.

We spend the remainder of the time talking about capitals and when they should be used, and he seemed to be starting to get the idea. Today I've got a bunch of exercises prepared for him to test out how much he remembers. I glanced through the grammar/mechanics portions of the GED and found that capital letters and ending punctuation are so basic they aren't even on it. He's going to have to understand things like commas and semicolons.

At least I won't run out of material for him.

Staten Island Half: Done! Now what?

This race was distinct for several reasons. First, it was the fifth one I've run in New York, meaning that I've accomplished my goal of running a half marathon in each borough. Second, for the first time I had a running buddy (sort of); my chain smoking, exercise-averse, cynical friend Ferran came along. And third, it was my first time on the Staten Island Ferry and on Staten Island itself, and I couldn't have picked a more spectacularly beautiful day for it.

To my amusement, Ferran read this as "OMG caffeine" and was confused.

Shirts from the New York Half-Marathon series - ironclad proof that I a) ran all of them, and b) will never be hired by The GAP as a t-shirt folder.

A very grouchy, still-drunk Ferran and I met in the first car of the 1 train a little after 6:00 this morning to head down to the Staten Island Ferry. He was covering a film festival freelance for some online news publication all weekend, and he took full advantage of their open bar towards the end of last night. He got home at around 3:00 A.M., and wasn't too cheerful after only a few hours' sleep. We made it to the Ferry terminal in plenty of time and waited as part of a huge crowd before boarding.

Ferran is crabby.

I'm excited.

One last pre-race cigarette

I was the only one who did not take the escalator, which I thought was pretty funny. Here we were, surrounded by some of the fittest people in New York, and everyone fled from the single flight of stairs.

Boarding the Ferry. I was worried we wouldn't all fit, but there was plenty of room to spare.

The Ferry is gigantic. It took us about 20 minutes to get to Staten Island. The ride over was chilly and windy, but sunny, and I worried that my shorts and tank top weren't going to be warm enough for the run. I took pictures and watched barges swarming all over the place.

Pulling away from Manhattan. We passed the Statue of Liberty, but it was too bright and my pictures of it are terrible. You probably know what it looks like anyway.

Once we docked, we hurried towards the starting line, took off our outer layers, checked our bags, and found the right area of the starting corral. I was helping Ferran pin on his number as the national anthem was winding down, but we ducked under the tape and into the starting corral in time to start with the group.

It was clear immediately that my choice of clothing was a good one; I warmed up almost immediately and was comfortable throughout the race. Ferran, propelled by adrenaline, techno music, remnants of last night's beer, and stubbornness, stayed about 15 feet in front of me for the first three miles, which surprised me. There were no water tables set up at Mile 1 and he gave me a very dirty look over his shoulder, as I'd promised him plenty of water throughout the course. He stopped at the water tables at Mile 2 and caught up to to me again a bit later. At Mile 3, he pulled over to drink and after about 1/10th of a mile I heard a terrible wheezing drawing up behind me.

"Shit, man," he groaned.

"You should probably slow down. We have 10 miles left," I said helpfully.

"Whatever," he gasped, but he fell back, and that was the last I saw of him for a while.

I chatted with a few other runners throughout the rest of the race. I got several compliments on my shirt, and one guy told me cheerfully that I wasn't allowed to run in the bike lane but that my secret was safe with him (ha ha). There were several crowds of middle and high school kids with signs, having more fun cheering than actually watching what was going on. Never mind, distance running isn't exactly a premium spectator sport, and they kept things interesting. My favorite spectator, however, was a burly guy in his late 50's who was there to watch his daughter. He'd pick a spot on the sidelines, wait for her to go by, then hop on his bike and race to another spot farther down the line. While he waited, he doled out useful information to passing runners about using your arms to get up hills and how many minutes per mile we were running.

My favorite fellow runner came up behind me around Mile 8. I heard him about ten minutes before I finally spotted him: a stooped guy in his 40's wearing giant headphones and carrying a discman, which I had forgotten used to exist. Each time he passed a spectator, he howled (for full effect, read at full volume with the most nasal, strident, obnoxious New York accent you can muster) "I started half an hour late!" My fellow scrubs and I, with whom he obviously did not want to be associated, tittered. He passed us pretty handily, though, and was out of my line of sight within a few minutes.

The course was much hillier than I anticipated. There was a turn-around point so that we were running alongside another stream of runners going the opposite direction. I cheered for the first woman, as usual, and about five minutes after I'd turned the corner and started to head back to the finish line, I spotted Ferran. He looked surprisingly cheerful and waved at me.

I felt good and enjoyed myself more than almost any other race I can remember. Staten Island gets a bad rap, but the part we ran through was beautiful, and it was pretty cool to look across the water at the Manhattan skyline as I jogged along. Between a terrible cold and a strained hamstring, my training since the Bronx Half had been sporadic at best; I realized after about Mile 4 that I hadn't run more than about 7 miles since the Bronx, over a month before. So I cruised along at a comfortable pace and had fun with it. At Mile 12 I was at 1:43, the time it took me to finish the Manhattan Half in March. Oh well.

I finished easily, watched Ferran cross, and stretched on the grass overlooking the water for a few minutes before taking the Ferry back.

It's hard to believe that the series is really over. Now I'm faced with a big problem though: What is my next goal going to be?

Finished!

I was quite proud of this shirt, and got several compliments from other runners on the course.

Our Bar

I think at least half of the people I know in New York are theater people. One guy I know is a voice actor, another is some sort of whiz kid with the computer programs that control show lighting. I know dancers and singers, live performers and people who do film - when the can land jobs, that is. They're exhausting to hang around sometimes (you'd think actors would want to take a break from performing in their downtime, but you'd be wrong), but the upshot is that I get to see some pretty interesting shows.

Last night, for instance, I headed down to a two-story bar on the lower East Side for a performance called Our Bar. A friend of mine has been performing with them for a while and he suggested I come check them out. The premise is pretty interesting. The show takes place on the second floor. The audience sits at tables, or on bar stools and couches (or, if they're 20 minutes late because the guy they asked for directions when they got out of the subway pointed them in the opposite direction they should have gone and they walked the wrong way for 10 minutes without realizing it they stand anywhere they can find a space). The actors walk in between the tables, doing mini scenes all over the bar. When I arrived, a guy had just burst into the bar and ordered a drink to celebrate the fact that his cat had just had kittens. Then he faded into the corner and a trio of girls bitched about their waitressing jobs. Then their conversation quieted just in time for a guy to give his friend advice on picking up a girl. During the show, we were encouraged to order drinks from the bar or food from the kitchen, but the bartender w ordered from was an actress, and in between serving customers she'd play her role in the scenes that were unfolding with the actors. The waitress was also part of the show; I guess the real waitstaff got the night off. The dialogue was clever and the way the scenes blended together kept things interesting. And I loved being part of the performance space.

After the show, I got to meet a few of the actors. They seem like a pretty fun group. Even though they don't get paid for this, they were all really talented. New York has more talent than it knows what to do with. There are performances every month, and I'm looking forward to the next show. Now I know where the bar is, so maybe this time I'll get a seat.

Bryant Park

Bryant Park is one of the thousand places in New York I keep meaning to visit more often. It's located on 42nd St. about halfway between Grand Central Station and Times Square which puts it about as close to the middle of Manhattan as it's possible to be. It's illogically peaceful there, despite the fact that streets choked with cars are a mere stone's throw away.

There's always something going on at Bryant (which is another reason it shouldn't be peaceful). During the summer, they showed classic movies there once a week (Bonnie and Clyde, Twelve Angry Men, etc.) and loads of people sprawled out on the grass to enjoy one of the few opportunities to get something cool for free in New York. Today's schedule includes a morning birding tour of the park (for pigeon enthusiasts, I imagine), juggling, live piano music, and an evening ping pong tournament. All of this is up for grabs for people lucky enough to have part of their Wednesday free.

I was wandering through recently, when I saw wheeled bookshelves arranged between the tables. Naturally, this is the sort of thing that draws me like a magnet. There were signs everywhere designating this area of the park as a reading room and demanding quiet. I perused a shelf of classics like Jane Eyre and A Tale of Two Cities, but settled on one of those quirky, light books of fun facts about the English language, as I was on my way to meet Dave for a free lunch at his bar. The book was disappointing, but I loved the idea of a reading room in the middle of the park. People had borrowed novels, cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, and reference books from various shelves and were either absorbed or else staring off into space with the pages spread in front of them. Both looked like great ways to unwind a little in the frenzied center of this madhouse of a city.

More on Miguel

I completed more of Miguel's initial assessment today and got some surprising results. Based on his performance during our last session, I wasn't expecting him to get too far, so I had some lower-level words lists ready to go. The first subtest assesses phonics knowledge. It shows letters and clusters of letters out of context, and the client has to either identify the ones they hear the practitioner saying or read the letters themselves. Miguel soared through, achieving mastery scores on nearly all of the sections. Oh.

Next: sight words. I tape recorded him reading forty words from flash cards. He read them faster than I could flip the cards without making any errors.

The spelling test was next, and based on his answers during the previous tests, I guessed that there would be some rough spots here. Typically, unskilled spellers have difficulty hearing short vowel sounds (especially ones that sound kind of similar like /u/ and /o/) and representing long vowel sounds that are formed with more unconventional vowel combinations (e.g. ai in wait; they always want to write "wate"). Miguel nailed each of the short vowel sounds I gave him. Predictably, he had trouble with about half of the long vowel words I gave him. Other problem areas for poor spellers tend to be blends (like, well, bl in blend or fr in fresh) and digraphs (like sh in shut or ch in coach). He wrote each blend correctly, contrary to my expectations, and was reasonably accurate representing digraphs as well, mixing up ch and sh once each.

At this point, I was starting to think that my initial impressions were way off. But after a moment's reflection, I decided that this shift sort of made sense. The assessment tests I gave him during the last session concerned mostly auditory processing, the way a person hears the sounds in language, whereas today's tests were all about knowing letter-sound correspondence. He may not hear sounds the way I would, but he was certainly showing me that he'd learned the rules, most likely by rote.

The next and last part of today's session were word lists; from these, I'm supposed to select reading passages for him so that I can assess his fluency and comprehension skills in our next session. I'd initially expected him to struggle with the first grade-level passage, but luckily I happened to have copies of each list. I started with first grade, just to be safe, then handed him second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and upper middle school. He wasn't perfect on the last few, but he was pretty close. Based on the number of words a client misses, the practitioner determines whether s/he should be able to read a passage at that grade level independently, whether it is at instructional level, or whether it will lead to frustration. Miguel tested instructional at an upper middle school level.

All of this is very unexpected and interesting, but I don't think I'll truly have a good sense of his abilities until the next session when I'll test his reading comprehension and his writing. When he was reading the word lists, I got the sense that, while he was decoding the words correctly, he wasn't always clear on what they meant. I'll be able to use his comprehension levels to test this hunch. We call these types of readers "word callers." They read accurately, but either don't pay attention to the words they are reading or else have such poor vocabularies that they can't make meaning out of them. Miguel doesn't seem to be too worried about the reading portion, however. He predicts that writing will be his worst area.

At the end of the session, we talked about the GED. He said he was enrolled in a preparation class for about a semester. Although he passed the prerequisite test to get into the class, once in he felt he was falling behind and after a semester, he dropped it. So GED prep will be our immediate goal. Screenplays will stay on the back burner for a while.

Just for fun, here is a sample of words from the upper middle school list:

-emulate

-infrared

-assimilate

-migration

-gravity

-persecution

-inevitable

Down and Dirty at the Mud Run

I didn't think much about the Mud Run until early this morning, when my alarm went off and I stumbled out of the house with my bag. Normally I pack the afternoon before the big day, throwing items into a bag from a list I've been thinking about for a few days. I check the forecast obsessively in the weeks before the race. I visit the race website again and again for tips about the course, start times, etc. Because the Mud Run is only 10k (about 6 miles) however, I didn't bother with any of that. This led to a rather more eventful morning than I'd anticipated.

My dad's Mud Run several years ago had an obstacle similar to this one, the final hurrah for this course.

I took a bus, then a subway in time to meet another bus that would take me to the course in Pelham Bay at the far end of the Bronx. A group of about 20 other runners were gathered around the bus stop, and as we waited in the weak morning light it occurred to me for the first time that it was really cold. I'd watched my Dad do a Mud Run in Lemoore in summer several years before. I remember it being hot, and it's been hot here for the past few months. Plus, I don't generally get too chilly when I run - quite the opposite in fact. So under my thin sweatpants and sweatshirt I was wearing a tank top and shorts, and the only shoes I'd brought aside from my running shoes were flip flops. I didn't seem to be as cold as many of the other people waiting (some of whom were bundled up as though it were 10 degrees out and were hopping up and down and "brrrr"ing dramatically), but the air was definitely crisp. Cool. Brisk. Refreshing. When the bus dropped us about a mile from the course and we walked over grass and fallen acorns between leafy, graciously shady oak trees, I thought to myself that this was rather wonderful. There was a flock of Canadian geese picturesquely dotting the adjacent lawn, for crying out loud. Ah, fall.

The scene was less idyllic when we arrived at near the starting line, where a frenetic emcee was babbling at dizzying speed over a too-loud PA system. I collected my bib, D-tag, and t-shirt (a brown, quick-dry number), snapped pictures of the 5kers finishing their race, and put off taking off my sweats. It was downright chilly by now, probably in the mid-50's. The sun was pouting behind a cloud and the wind had picked up - we were, after all, at the edge of a bay. Fifteen minutes before the race, however, there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet, strip off my outer layers and jog to the corral. Because of a monumental cold I was still reeling a bit from, I wasn't sure I was up to snuff, so I chose the 8 to 9-minute mile corral. We waited, everyone around me wearing many more layers than I was and jumping up and down, rubbing their hands, etc. My core felt ok, actually, no shivers, but I was pretty goosebumpy. I used a tall guy next to me as a windbreak without his knowledge or consent. After Dad and I climbed Shasta two summers ago, my two big toes stayed almost totally numb for about a week after we returned to Visalia (mild frostbite, says Dad) and were prickly and partially numb for a few weeks after that. They've not been the same since, and lose feeling pretty quickly. This morning, they took my other toes and the balls of my feet with them. I jumped from unfeeling foot to unfeeling foot and rubbed my bare arms.

"Medals" waiting to be awarded to participants. Cute, huh?

The scene as I arrived. The 5K was underway.

The end of the 5K. The end of the 10K looked pretty much the same, but I was in no position to be handling a camera at that point.

The first wave of runners finally set off, but the official didn't let anyone else go for a while in an attempt to keep bottlenecks from forming at the obstacles. He allowed three minutes between each wave, and I had foolishly positioned myself in the fifth wave. I passed the time by watching my fingernails turn from pale pink, to purple, to a troubling whitish-gray.

We began at last, the first stretch taking us along a paved road next to a closed section of beach. The obstacles were generally spaced about a mile apart, and by the time we reached the first one my nails were back to purple and my smaller toes were beginning to tingle very slightly. It was a series of three hurdles that were about shoulder-height for me. I hoisted myself over them using the support beams for leverage and continued on. By obstacle #2, a high-ish wall which I scrambled over by launching myself off a handy rock, my nails were pink again. Half a mile later, I was relieved to note that I could feel my feet hitting the ground, not just jarring in my ankles as the numb feet somewhere below them made contact with the earth.

Obstacle #3 was a web of netting that we had to climb over, and I was happy to have full use of my hands and feet again. My joy was short-lived, however, because less than half a mile away was a mud pit with "razor wire" to crawl under. I was scolded by the supervising soldiers for smiling as I dove into the mud (they flicked water at me from buckets, as if that was going to make a lick of difference), and further scolded me for staying on my hands and knees and not doing a "military crawl." So I groaned, and belly-flopped. The mud was chilly, but my body temperature was up so I didn't mind, and later in the race it would actually dry into a toasty layer.

Now my socks and shoes were filled with mud and my feet felt heavy. There had been very coarse sand/small bits of gravel in the mud, and my knees and elbows felt torn to shreds. My feet were being scraped inside my socks with each step. Nevertheless, this is the point at which I began to pass people pretty handily. Some "runners" stopped to walk, which I found exceedingly unimpressive, and others were moving at slow jog, whereas I felt fine in spite of my feet and my scrapes. I quite enjoyed the rest of the run, although my unladylike honking as I tried to clear my trachea of residual phlegm from my cold must have made it seem otherwise. We went in and out of quiet woods and it was lovely. Obstacle #5 was the most difficult for me. It was a pyramid of straw bales-turned slide that I slipped down the side of twice before I was able to scale it. The mud on my clothes stayed wet, but it dried on my skin. My pasttime of admiring the hue of my fingernails was over - they were brown now, along with both hands and arms past the elbows - but I was warm enough that I didn't care. The race went by quickly, and before I knew it I was near the finish line.

The course veered to the side suddenly, leading us into the bay where we slogged through three-ish feet of water for about 75 yards. This cleaned some of the mud from my legs, and I was able to admire the bloody scrapes on my knees. Then we crossed the beach to get to the next obstacle, a soapy slope with ropes you had to lunge for and seize before you slid back down. Finally, I dove into the last mud pit and began shimmying my way to the end. This was by far the worst part. I swear the bottom of that pit was lined with broken glass. My tender knees and elbows were further assaulted, as were my hipbones. But, as I'm sure you've guessed, I did make it to the end and was soon having my face and hands hosed off by a volunteer.

The soapy slope. I slid back down on my first try attempt and had to go back at it with more momentum for Round Two.

Getting hosed off so we could a) locate our bags, and b) handle them.

Showing off my medal, which I haven't unwrapped yet because I don't want it to get muddy.

My socks were white just an hour before.

The "showers" were hoses that sprayed lukewarm water in an open meadow. It took more than five minutes of hosing to get most of the mud off; it just kept coming out of every fold of clothing. I joked with the girl next to me that I was pretty sure I could plant a garden in my sports bra. I'd have loved to strip all the way down, but this part was co-ed and so I wasn't too successful in getting the mud out of the inner layers. I had not brought a towel, which I would probably have thought to bring had I checked the race website, but I was able to use my extra, clean t-shirt as a towel and wear the Mud Run shirt home. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked well enough.

I left the women's changing tent with wet hair and a damp body under damp clothes. My toes, not impressed with the flip flops I'd changed into, quickly checked out again, and I hobbled to the post-race BBQ. My fantasies of a warm meal were shattered, however, when I was told upon arrival that there were no more veggie burgers. I contented myself with a bag of Cheetos and some Oreos and headed back to the bus stop. I wanted to chop down each and every one of the gracious oak trees that prevented the sun, which was now out in full force, from warming me. The picturesque flock of geese had moved on, and the lawn which I crossed now was a minefield of hazards. I contemplated the spot-on veracity of the phrase "like shit through a goose" as I shivered and waited for the bus to arrive.

Once on the bus, my spirits rose, and a little more than an hour later I was home, showered, and sipping hot tea. My knees, elbows, and hips will take a bit more time to recover, I fear, but I had a fantastic time and would certainly run one of these races again.

Hurts so good. This actually looks worse now than it did then, as it has swollen up considerably.

Times are not yet posted and I have no idea how I did, but I felt good throughout and think my pace was decent despite having had a fussy hamstring and a cold interrupt my training for the last month or so. This will be my last run before the Staten Island Half-Marathon next Sunday. I'm thrilled to run that one because it will mean that I've reached my goal of running one half in each borough!