The weather was brutal this weekend, even in the northeast. In fact, I think it was hotter in Boston than it was at home.
Somehow I managed to get there and back without too much trouble despite some potentially catastrophic problems with the flights.
I left on the same flight to New York that I had taken two weeks earlier, so I got up at the same time, and pretty much did everything as I had did it the first time. The plane left from the same gate, too. We left the gate on time and went about a mile down the taxiway when suddenly the pilot pulled over into this holding area and throttled the engines back to idle. He then informed us that all three airports in the New York area were no longer landing planes because of fog. So we sat there. And sat there. Tons of other planes go by on the taxiway, but one other pulls over and sits next to us while we wait. Finally, over an hour goes by and the pilot says we will be getting under way.
This screwed everything up because I only had an hour and a half for my connection. By the time we landed and got off the plane I had about 20 minutes to haul it over to the Shuttle terminal and get on the next plane. At least that was what I thought during the flight up to New York. When I finally got in the terminal and looked at the monitors, they had cancelled my flight to Boston. At that point I thought I was done. Since I was flying stand by, I wouldn’t have a confirmed seat and could only take what was open. Everyone that was on the cancelled flight would overflow on to the next one which could potentially fill up all of the remaining seats. The good news was that there was a flight to Boston every hour, so I could just sit around all day until I got on one.
Somehow I made it on to the next flight and got to Boston at 1 PM, only an hour after I had planned to. The US Airways Shuttle terminal, and the flight, was packed with all kinds of suits, busily scribbling notes on expensive paper, typing furiously on their laptops, or blathering away on their cell phones. I was pretty impressed with the whole shuttle operation, considering the mobs of people all over the place, everyone got on the plane really fast and we landed on time despite leaving ten minutes late. I must have gotten the last seat on the plane. The agent called my name after most everyone had boarded and the few people who were in line behind me filled up the remaining seats.
Sean, my roommate from freshman year, met me near Baggage Claim and we spent a good 15 minutes looking for his car. He couldn’t seem to remember where he parked it even though he remembered the section number where he thought he did. It turned out there was another garage that used the same location system. It took us awhile to get out once we found the car since there was so much traffic. Actually, the traffic was pretty much backed up for about half the drive to his house in Gloucester.
For the most part, I see the East Coast as being pretty much homogenous, environmentally. It’s pretty flat, the same trees can be found no matter where you are and the shifts in seasons are pretty much the same. Even in Rhode Island, I could say that the area was almost the same as where I live, but as we travelled north on 95, you could definitely notice that the environment had changed. Where Sean lives, the coast is very rocky and there are hills everywhere too. It’s so rocky, that in some places the ground is almost completely covered in large rock slabs, boulders, and smaller rocks with trees shooting up in between them. It’s a wonder anything can grow, but there are entire forests shooting up through these rocks. The trees even look different too. They appear more windblown or roughed up, much like the trees near the beach where I live, but trees like this appear miles inland. There are also more large fir trees. This was a lot like how I remembered Maine, which wasn’t too surprising considering Maine wasn’t that far away, but Boston and everything to the south (which was probably closer) seems more like the East Coast I know. Of course I could also talk about how Florida is a lot different from home, as well, but for the most part, about 70% of the East Coast looks the same.
Sean has one of the more interesting neighborhoods I’ve seen. The houses and roads aren’t really organized in any way and kind of wind through areas of intermittent marshes, rock, and woods. The houses are spread out along really windy one lane roads and give the appearance that each house is isolated with nothing around it but trees and rock. Each house is built in the classic New England cottage fashion, but none are remotely alike except for this generalization. Sean’s backyard is at the base of a rocky cliff that goes straight up for at least 30 feet and the front of his house is only about that far from the road, which doesn’t really matter considering how little traffic goes through.
We pulled into his house around 2:30 or so, and then left to go run in a park that was close to the actual island of Gloucester. Naturally, there were tons of rocks and hills on the trail, but it was pretty nice and a welcome change from home.
Sean’s mom made us pasta with sausage and meatballs for dinner and then we went out to pick up his brother from some kind of track meeting at his high school. Along the way I got a basic tour of the area including where all the big fishing trawlers were moored, which was where The Perfect Storm was filmed. It turned out that when we got to the high school that Liam didn’t need a ride back, but we hung out there for a while anyways since Sean knew everyone and talked with them.
As with all race days, Saturday was pretty uneventful. We just sat around the house watching Planet of the Apes on TV. I went out for a walk to stay loose around noon and just about died from the heat. The sun had been covered by the clouds earlier, but it had emerged and was now inflicting pain and suffering on all who ventured outdoors. Since Sean didn’t have air conditioning I did my best to stay hydrated and probably drank twice the amount of water I normally do on race day.
We left his house before 5 PM to get to Bentley, and got there after 5:30, which was a shorter drive than from Murphy’s place considering we had traffic this time around.
By the time I had warmed up, I was pretty much drenched in my own sweat, and was drowning in it by the time I finished racing. The heat was brutal. On the 11:00 news that night, it was still over 80 in Boston and had reached about 90 for a high. This was the first week of hot weather, especially since last week there were a few days of 60s and rain.
The race didn’t go all that well. Partly because of the heat and partly because there was nobody else in the race to run with. Both of those things can make it a lot easier to run, and both were definitely to my advantage two weeks ago, but not this time. I won the battle, but lost the war, so to speak, and wound up running five or six seconds slower than two weeks ago. I was doing well at the mile, but at about halfway, things got rough.
I just about died on the cooldown and haven’t really felt normal while running since the race (or normal at all for that matter). Sean’s dad had come back from work when we got back and we had burgers.
The next morning I woke up before anyone else and went for my run before I had to go to the airport. Sean definitely has some good places to run, even from his house. The terrain and environment makes things a lot more interesting than at home. There is also very little traffic on the roads and just about all of the larger roads have a bike path/lane so you can run on that too.
Sean dropped me at the airport in plenty of time for my 12:00 flight back to New York, again on the Shuttle. Again, I was surprised that I was able to get on it because it was a very full flight. Despite being mostly full of business travellers, I had to sit in the same row as this kicking and wailing 2 year old who had some kind of fixation with the window shades. She kept pulling them up and down during the entire trip. Just about everyone around me was staring at the dad and the kid, hoping the fuss would stop.
The original plan was to wait in New York until the 3:30 flight to Norfolk, but it turned out that an earlier flight was delayed that I would have missed had it left on time. I got my listing changed to that flight and managed to get home over an hour earlier than planned. Good thing I did that, because all of the later Norfolk flights got delayed as well, and one of them was cancelled.
Overall it wasn’t a bad trip and it was a good experience, especially to go somewhere new, but I wished I could have raced better. Now it’s time to start thinking about the fall.
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