The Blogher 5k & Cleopatra’s Needle

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I wish I could crop myself out of this photo and it still be relevant to my story, lol

A while ago, before summer, I had started the Couch to 5k program. It was fun, since I was pretty much running on the treadmill while one kid was napping and another was in school. It was a little bit of quiet time and it was rewarding to see how I could run for longer each time (instead of dying after 1 minute, like I thought I would). Then, baby Marc was sick, then school was over, etc. and I gave it up. Womp womp!

Once I finally decided that I was going to Blogher, I tried to sign up for the Blogher 5k. It sounded pretty exciting to run through NYC and see the sights. I also thought that it would motivate me to actually start running again. Instead, I was never taken off the waitlist and I never got my butt off the couch. I still wanted to join in, especially after my brother encouraged me that “anyone can slog their way through a 5k” and it would be a good experience. So I tweeted and emailed and was released from the waitlist. Yippee!

Until the morning of the 5k. Two of my roommates (yes, there were 4 grown women in one double room) were also running the 5k, so we headed down to the area where we were supposed to meet and there was no 5k. Like, really. There was a woman at a table with a laptop who had a route that we “could” use, and it “wasn’t quite a 5k” and then “just come back and have breakfast with all the other attendees.” It was pretty disappointing. I didn’t want to be timed or anything (ha!), but a bib or a sticker or anything to say “I did this!” would have been nice.

But what can you do? We were still ready to go, so off we went to run the shorter path in Central Park. My roommates, Cathy and Mariana, were very kind and “slogged” along with me when they could have left me in the dust. So thanks girls!! While we were kind of getting lost on our path, we ended up taking the long way around the park instead of the shorter way. Whoops!

It was lucky for me, because we stumbled upon something that I really wanted to check out sometime I was in NYC. Have you ever heard of Cleopatra’s Needle? I hadn’t, until just a few weeks ago. I finally read a book that I’ve been wanting to read for years now: Earth Abides by George Stewart. I love the dystopia genre, and I thought this one was fascinating because it was written 1949. It has the same eerie quietness of The Walking Dead. When the main character drives through New York, he mentions driving by Cleopatra’s Needle. Since I was reading this on my Kindle, I had to do a quick search of what that was. When I found out that it’s an obelisk that was transplanted in NY from Egypt, and actually pre-dates Cleopatra by thousands of years, my dorky little heart was excited. “I’ll have to check it out someday!” I thought to myself

So what do you know? As I’m huffing and puffing it, I look to my left and there she is! Like Cathy said, it was one of those things you’d never find if you were looking for it. It was just there. Mariana snapped a quick pic of me in front of it, and I checked into it on Foursquare, and I excitedly texted my husband that I was at the thing I had bored him with details about a few weeks earlier.

Now the 5k itself was a disappointment, but now I have a really cool story and was able to see something ancient and amazing. Cool, right?!