Amanda and I brought ham and cheese crescent party rollups and entered dingleberry in the favorite-word contest.
My submitted definition was: burrs of fabric that cling to your butt.
This was our contribution to Harry's Handicap, Prospect Park Track Club's New Year's Day race and potluck. It was a pretty complete summary of how I wanted to start 2019.
Harry's Handicap is one loop of Prospect Park, but everybody starts at a different time. You submit a recent 5K result and your best estimate for a park loop. The slower runners start first. The faster runners wait. If the math is right, everybody reaches the finish in one big mess.
The race started in 1977 and is named for club co-founder Harry Murphy. It has vintage reusable canvas bibs, handwritten start times, and enough history that everybody seems to know at least one version of how the race is supposed to work.
That seriousness sits right next to the potluck spreadsheet asking for a sweet or savory dish and your favorite word.
A normal race sorts itself out quickly. The fast people disappear, everybody else finds a pace, and most of the field spends the rest of the morning surrounded by roughly the same runners. Harry's keeps the whole thing unsettled. The people ahead are trying not to get caught. The people behind are coming fast. Every set of footsteps could change the order.
The week leading into it had stayed close to home. Amanda and I walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade a couple of days before Christmas. We spent Christmas at home with Eva. I still got out for a group run because the running club part of my life does not observe much of a holiday shutdown.
New Year's Day brought everybody back to Prospect Park. The handicap format changes the feeling of the race. There is no single gun followed by the usual sorting of fast runners to the front. People wait, start in small groups, and spend the loop chasing or being chased by friends they would rarely finish beside in a normal race.
The calculations do not need to be perfect to make that work. They only need to be close enough that the finish line gets crowded. For once, the person who usually finishes first might spend the whole race behind everybody else.
When the running was over, we went back to Shepherd's Hall for the potluck. Our party rollups joined Christmas leftovers, mini quiches, and whatever else people could carry to a race on the morning after New Year's Eve.
Three days later the annual club awards nomination email arrived. I forwarded it to Amanda with one instruction: "Make sure to nominate me for something pleassseee!!!"
I stretched please out as far as necessary. That seemed appropriately formal.