Perpetual Astonishment

Four weeks into my Hamptons...

…marathon training schedule, and I have already slipped from my rah-rah enthusiasm of day one. Last week (the third for those of you who can subtract), I ran just two days out of seven. Two. I didn’t loll on the sofa all week; there was certainly a fair amount of romping and wave-diving and skateboard-shredding, but when the sun set on Sunday evening and left me to face my margarita and paperback sans sweat, I felt like a big fat loser, emphasis on the fat part.

Therefore come Monday I determined to put serious mileage behind me. I hit the Hudson River Park just as the sun touched the Jersey skyline…and just as a couple of fake-baked Abercrombie brosephs rounded the corner at 41st.

Normally when boys catch up to me on the trail I let them pass. Not all are faster, of course, but most of them breeze by, and I chalk it up to biology. However these two gents, if gents they be, jogged at such a pace that if you had pushed your baby stroller in the opposite direction, you’d have rightfully assumed that I in my 2004 frat tee and these Hollister models were running together, like we were friends or some other nonsense. Bitches, please.

So I did what I always do when girls close in on my heels. I dropped a cinder block on my mental gas pedal and crept past Bill and Ted. Read this bullshit! They picked up the pace! They tried to keep up with me! And for a while they almost had me beat. One would sneak ahead and then glance over his shoulder at his manpatriot with this look of complete disdain, like, who does this girl think she is but maybe I should ask for her digits, and then I’d pull in front as if to say, Ask me out, I dare you. We’ll go to TGIFriday’s, and then he would pass me, and back and forth, and I don’t even remember what I was blasting on the iPod at the moment that helped me run so fast, but I’m pretty sure it was Akon, which makes sense because Akon always makes me hustle due to its aural equivalency of a Bacardi and Coke, and then finally - finally! - I stopped feeling their brosephness in such close and sweaty proximity, and I looked deep into the recesses of my periph. Once again and happily, I was running alone.