Manhattan Rack Attack and Times Square

Staring at a train station bike rack on a recent Saturday morning, I found myself in a predicament.

I had a bike and here was a bike rack, but lo and behold, I had forgotten my bike lock. To make matters worse, I was catching a train to work and didn't want to be late. What to do?

Thinking quickly — perhaps too quickly — I decided just to take the bike along with me from New Haven to Grand Central. I never had taken the bike on the train before but had seen others do it and didn't worry too much about it. The bike fit nicely in the entryway on the opposite side of the station platforms, and I was able to wedge it in so it wouldn't fall.

But a more troubling dilemma confronted me when I got to the city. I figured I'd just sneak the bike in with me at work, but the security guy at my building blocked my way. "You can't bring that in," he said. "Bikes aren't allowed." It's a policy I was aware of but didn't think they'd enforce, especially as I pleaded for leniency.

No mercy.

The result was that I spent my first hour of work in a panic over the fate of my bike, which I had to leave propped up against a bike rack on Sixth Avenue lock-less, free for anyone to snatch if they simply noticed it wasn't tethered to any permanent object. After checking in with my co-workers, I excused myself to rush down 46th Street to a bike shop and pick up a new bike lock, about $25, and preserve my treasured vehicle. It had lasted a half hour without getting stolen, so I counted myself fortunate.

The upside of this story is that after work I had some time to kill, so I decided to venture around on the bicycle, my first time doing so in the city. I still wanted to get home at a reasonable hour and therefore limited my Manhattan excursion to a short loop, which just happened to take me through Times Square.

The excitement of biking down Broadway on a Saturday evening with the giant digital advertisements flashing and tourists shuffling around in every direction is hard to express. It's impossible to kick into high gear in that traffic, yet there is a feeling of speed and intensity when passing through that famous crossroads on a bike rather than strolling on foot. Almost made my absentmindedness worth the extra effort.

New York City Opens Its Streets, Some

Any runner with a will and a way will be foolish to pass up the opportunity to run in the middle of the street in Manhattan the next three Saturday mornings.

Running in the middle of the street? Wouldn't that be the definition of foolish?

Any other Saturday morning, yes. But Mayor Bloomberg and his people have wrested parts of Lafayette, Park, Fourth Avenue and 72nd Street away from motorized traffic and will give them over to runners, pedestrians, bicyclists, mimes, chalk artists, street vendors and the rest of the metro menagerie from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Aug. 9, 16 and 23.

This means, you can complete a traffic-free run of about seven miles from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a stretch of pavement that at other times would be overrun by taxis, trucks and an array of other gas guzzlers.

This closed-street initiative follows the failure of Bloomberg's ambitious congestion pricing plan for Midtown Manhattan and parts to the south, which died at the hands of Sheldon Silver and the rest of the do-nothing Albany mafia. So creating a traffic-free route through Manhattan for a total of 18 hours in the summer (when New Yorkers desert Manhattan on weekends anyway) is kind of a sad consolation prize. But if this works out, who knows, maybe Bloomberg will find a way to close streets across the whole island, and for more than a Saturday morning.

For more information on the city's Summer Streets program, click here.

Thoughts From a West Side Five-Miler

Can't help myself sometimes, gotta make my way out to the Hudson River and the paved bicycle and pedestrian pathway that runs from Battery Park north along Manhattan's West Side as far as I can imagine. Nothing grand to say about my recent run from 46th Street south, but some stray musings:

• The waterfront park along the river is really coming along. Parts still are under construction, but more is open now than the last time I ran this route. Which means it's easier to get closer to the river's edge for views of New Jersey and the Statue of Liberty. I also stumbled across a working water fountain — runner's gold — near Pier 50. The guy who was using it muttered, "Not very cold," and wandered away, but I found it to be quite refreshing.

• New York in the summer is populated by a whole host of familiar yet hard-to-identify smells that slap you in the face and then slink into the closest alley. Someday I'll figure out the source of these mostly putrid aromas. Some guesses: rotting garbage, plant fertilizer, illegal falafel stands, pizza shop body odor, fresh fish, rotting fish, decomposing human remains, animal feces, human feces, wet cardboard shelters, flat tires, greasy burgers, common sludge...

• Only 62 days until the re-opening of the Intrepid Museum.

• Meeting people in the city can be a precarious proposition. One missed message or misinterpreted direction and you're left waiting and wondering. I was supposed to run with a friend and thought we had it all figured out, meet at 46th Street and the river. He never showed. Turned out he was waiting on the other side of some bushes on the pedestrian path, while I was street-side waiting on the bike path. We were maybe 50 feet away and didn't realize until afterward.

• Big frustration with big-city running: the Garmin GPS can't locate it's satellites among all the skyscrapers. Eventually the device picks up the signal, but it's spotty until I make it to the river. So for the first mile or so I could be running at a steady pace but my speed will seem to fluctuate between Olympic Gold Medalist and Old Granny With Her Walker.

• The river south of 46th Street is a great run. But I wonder what I'd find if I were to turn north instead...

View from the Reservoir

The choice of Central Park as the cite of my first official NYC Marathon training run was less by design than out of convenience. An easy four-miler is right at hand here, and I stowed my stuff at New York Road Runners on 89th Street, which is on my way to work.

But it also felt right, walking through Engineers' Gate, imagining the day in November when I hopefully will turn into the park there from 90th street and finish the marathon's final few miles.

Waiting for my Garmin to locate its satellites, I stood at the reservoir's edge above the bust of John Purroy Mitchel, a mayor of NYC until his death in the first World War. From the railing I looked across the water to Central Park West where the residential buildings rose over the tree line reaching toward the clear blue sky. I looked down the hard-packed dirt path around the reservoir at the fellow runners and walkers.

Then I started off at an 8-minute pace, steering clear of the road in search of the less-traveled paths deeper into the park.

Island Train Blues

If there's an easy way to get from South Ferry to Midtown Manhattan, I haven't found it yet.

Why should it matter, you ask? True, a convenient park run is only as far away as Central Park. But in the interest of variety, I gave the Hudson River route another try yesterday, this time navigating the winding park walkways deep in the heart of Battery Park City — a waterfront route, as opposed to the straightaway down West Street through the World Financial Center and Ground Zero.

The problem is that the closest subway line is the 1, which I quickly discovered stops seemingly at every block for a never-ending ride back to Midtown. I could practically run the distance faster.

The N, Q, R and W trains are a little better but not easy to reach from Battery Park City. The other option is the green line up to Grand Central. This may or may not be quicker than the 1.

Maybe someday, when these legs are faster and more durable, I can avoid the subway altogether by running the four miles down and making the return trip by foot.

Does Running in a Tie Count?

The window for essential NYC Marathon training is fast approaching, and since I've been lax in my deliberate preparations, I've been keeping my morale up by considering the incidental training I squeeze in every day.

Is it fair to count the sprint I often have to make from work to the train station at the end of the day?

It's only about three-fourths of a mile from my building on Sixth Avenue to Grand Central. A brisk walk will get me there in little more than 10 minutes. But if I'm running late, look out fellow pedestrians! There I go, sometimes still sporting a tie, swinging my bag to my side, making a beeline through Midtown.

In a pinch, I can make it there in seven minutes, which necessitates an extreme workout, my heart racing as I leap onto the train between the closing doors. I've even started wearing sneakers to work so my feet don't get pavement-mangled in my dress shoes during the workaday jog.

Surely this is better than nothing, but perhaps "training" is too strong a word. Still, on the few days that I'm not running TOO late, and I've got the sneakers, and I'm traveling light, left the laptop at home, and it's not too hot and humid in the city, the run comes close to being enjoyable, brief as it is.

Natural Habitat of the City Runner

The city streets call you, O City Runner. Resist the tradewinds that carry the rest of the flock to the unnatural habitat of park pathways.

An ironic contradiction or merely pragmatic? That the road runners of New York Road Runners find their home base near the greatest urban park in the country. (To be fair, the park has plenty of roads.) The club's office is on 89th Street a block from Central Park, where the first New York City Marathon was held, in 1970. The park remains the site of many of the club's races, as well as the five-borough marathon's final few miles.

I won't deny, when coming to Manhattan the northeast runner thinks of Central Park.

Nor will I deny the joy of a brisk park loop, though I prefer it in the off season when the skyline is visible through the leafless trees. Park running serves its purpose, but a city run should take place in the city.

A true city run harnesses the energy of the honking taxis, the wide-turning buses, the sidewalk food stands, the construction crews, the shuffling business people, even the tourists, wide-eyed and curious, not to mention the glorious hulking masses of concrete, steel and glass that flash in and out of the peripheral vision of the city runner.

The problem: Unless you time your run perfectly, you're gonna hit a stoplight — which is perfect if you need to rest, but for any momentum it's a killer.

Jane Jacobs, the late-great Greenwich Village resident and philosopher of city planning, wrote in her seminal "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) that short blocks are one of the essential components of vibrant city neighborhoods, because the increased potential for twists and turns brings people deeper into the diverse neighborhood. Rockefeller Center is a better stroll than the long blocks between Fifth and Sixth avenues found in the rest of Midtown.

"It is fluidity of use, and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture, that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city use," she writes.

But Adams' pools of city use were for workers, residents and pedestrians. Runners have their own modes of urban appreciation that aren't easily accommodated by even the best-designed neighborhoods.

If park runs are too removed and neighborhood runs too congested, then an appropriate alternative would be a run that takes in the urban landscape from a distance.

I recently felt my calling as a city runner during a five-miler along the Hudson River from Midtown to Battery Park. The paved running and biking path between the river and the West Side Highway is close enough to the traffic to feel the energy, but the runner's momentum is rarely threatened, except by the occasional cross-traffic. Glance off to the left and the Empire State Building towers over the lesser buildings nearby. Glance right and there's New Jersey across the Hudson. Ahead, the Statue of Liberty slowly comes into view. And with it, Lower Manhattan and World Financial Center and Ground Zero and Castle Clinton and Battery Park, where people wait in line for the boat to Liberty and Ellis islands.

Catch your breath, wipe the sweat and appreciate the city surroundings — before you duck into the subway to rejoin the flock.