Taking on Manhattan (and another successful long run)

Today's run:

Distance - 11.2 miles
Time - 1:31:00

This was a good one.  I was way too fast out of the gates (a 6:00 first mile?  whaaat?), but I managed to keep enough energy to get through it all.  I had planned to do only 10 miles.  I cranked out the last one just so I wouldn't have to walk it home in the cold!  Sure, I need to be better about evening out my pacing across the whole run, but I think it's good to get a feel for fast miles.  I want to know what my goal pace feels like, and I want to be able to keep running even after I've hit that goal pace.  Today I accomplished that.  Next I just need to be able to maintain that goal pace for, oh, a dozen miles or so.

My recovery meal/dinner:

Moroccan beef (think cinnamon and all spice!) and carrot-cranberry whole wheat couscous.  It ain't vegan, but it makes my husband happy and it was an all new recipe for me from an excellent cookbook that my brother and sister-in-law gave us.

We made this delish dish yesterday:

Baked salmon, orange-maple glazed beets, and roasted butternut squash and chickpeas.  Also not vegan, but pretty heavy on the vegetables anyway.  The beets recipe also came from the Kitchen Aid book.  This book is a winner!

I do love a home cooked meal, but this stuff isn't much when compared with the amazing eats I had in NY.

Lunch at Big Wong (seriously.) in Chinatown.  These are my lovely cousins with whom I enjoyed all these eats.

Pizza lunch at Eataly, my favorite place in NYC!

I finally had a Crumbs Bake Shop cupcake.  It was insane.  Highly recommended experience.

Of course, there were other eats (The Candle Cafe, which is vegan, was amazing and Hanjan was a pretty awesome Korean place), but the good stuff was the time I spent walking around the city with my cousins. 

We visited the Brooklyn Bridge.

Freedom Tower.

The Hudson River.

They were in the city for just a few days.  One of them was up here for the very first time, and the other was here for her second visit.  I really enjoyed taking them to some of my favorite spots.

When I was on my own, I managed to squeeze in three yoga classes!  Two of which were HOT!  AE (my bestie, in case you didn't already know) teaches yoga for an amazing studio called Yoga to the People.  They have several locations in the city and all of their classes and instructors are top notch.  Check them out if you ever get the chance.

I also went way, way uptown to Columbia University and took advantage of my frou-frou Ivy League privileges by getting a pass to the Columbia library.  I did some reading there for a few hours.  It was nice to have some quiet in an otherwise very loud city (not to mention the pleasure of a brief reprieve from strange smells wafting from strange characters), but the library was ice cold and I had to wrap my scarf around my head just to keep from freezing.  I don't have any pictures of that, sorry, but I did take a shot of the magnificent research room in the Butler Library.

Way back when I was visiting Columbia University as a prospective undergraduate (10 years ago!  *faint*), our tour guide told us that the Butler Library has so many books in it that it is actually sinking.  Amazing, right?

The place is enormous.  And I like that they have all my guys immortalized on the building's facade.  I went into the stacks (that's the name for where the books are stored in their seemingly endless rows of shelves), and I literally got lost.  The ceilings are low in the stacks and it made me feel dizzy and suffocated.  I started to panic, but I managed to retrace my steps and emerge from the scary stacks.  Horrible experience.  Definitely worth it, though, since I was able to read Born to Run for a few hours. 

Let me know if you guys want any recipes!  And let me know what fun stuff you like to do when you visit big cities.