I had secured a sweet Honda CRV Zipcar.
Beat the Bumble was a 10K trail race in Watchung Reservation, New Jersey. A group from Prospect Park Track Club wanted to go, which meant we needed cars, pickup points, and a plan for getting a bunch of runners out of Brooklyn before sunrise.
The CRV would comfortably fit three people plus me. It would less comfortably fit four plus me :).
I volunteered to drive the Grand Army Plaza crew and promised to send the exact meetup details later. The race started at nine. We were aiming to arrive by 8:20, which put our Brooklyn departure at 6:30.
I also wanted to know where the course went.
There was no obvious route posted, so I asked around and found a guy named Wayne who seemed to know what he was talking about. I drew what I thought was the course in Strava, attached a GPX file, and sent it to the group.
“I think I have the course map (ish).”
Wayne turned out to be the race director. The route was apparently trustworthy.
The rest was less precise. I could not park the Zipcar where I expected on race morning, so I moved the pickup to my building a few minutes from Grand Army Plaza and started texting everybody. This was not a major crisis. It was just 6:20 in the morning, cold and wet, with runners in different places and a car that needed to get onto the highway.
We made it.
The trail was muddy, rocky, and wet enough that the race organizers referred to one section as the river. The photograph from the course has me in a red PPTC shirt, yellow gloves, and a white hat, stepping over a log on a leaf-covered trail. It looks exactly like the kind of day it was.
I finished fourth.
Four days later, I mentioned the result to my coach almost in passing. I was already running more than 60 miles a week and felt good there. The trail race counted as hard training. The 15K the following weekend would be another hard effort. The races I was really organizing the winter around were the New York City Half in March and the duathlon national championships and world championships in April.
Beat the Bumble still got its own little operation: one rental car, one course map that was mostly right, and a wet ride home with the PPTC crew.