another good thing. roj told me yesterday (casually!), that he broke his pb on our monday run! wow! ... it's one thing to break my own pb (which i seem to be doing every week at the moment, including last night, when i broke it by 4 minutes!), but to be fast enough for him to break his is amazing. i am truly gobsmacked!

it's now exactly a week ago since the attacks happened on the world trade center and the pentagon. i've been back at work since yesterday and the atmosphere is very eery. you can still smell the smoke in the air down here - goodness knows how it is for the hundreds of rescue workers at the site. i went to have a look at the ruins yesterday and couldn't get close. i guess i was one of them, but i was annoyed at all the people crowding round any streets giving a view of the scene, jostling for the best view, avidly taking snapshots to run home and show their friends ...

a policeman asked me if i was ok in the morning. my anxiety was obviously pretty transparent. that he should even care how i was feeling (average passer-by), when he's inevitably been right up close to the scene, and working round-the-clock shifts, i don't know, but it was very moving.

there are cops and firemen and army crawling all over downtown manhattan, and here we are, putting all efforts into making pathetic websites. i feel so useless.

i received some nice news today though ... two of my old friends from flowers east are engaged to be married. they kept their relationship under wraps for about a year, but have finally realised they're meant for each other, so it's all out in the open now. superb news.

and just as a postscript ... if anyone's interested in taking open canoes down grade II / III rapids, sign up with keech and ann leclair at champaign canoeing. roj and i had an excellent weekend (part of which was just getting out of nyc) in brilliant sunshine learning the plethora of strokes needed to keep a canoe going in the required direction. it was amazing (and enlightening).

what can i say? it's now just over 24 hours since the hijacked planes first hit the world trade center ... so this time yesterday was the time that thousands of people were running for their lives in those towers ... many of them (above the blazes) unable to escape ... some of them jumping to their deaths rather than face the furnace inside. in about 10 minutes that first tower collapses ... followed shortly afterwards by the second.

today is quiet and shocked. today we're waiting for the real numbers of dead to come through. and we're waiting for news of who is responsible and what the US will do now ...

i can't believe it. every day i cycled under those towers and i loved them - they were a symbol of true manhattan to me - pristine, majestic, beautiful. yesterday i stood on the roof of the exchange looking at the towers burning, believing that the damage would be limitable. ushered from the roof we returned to the office and it was only minutes later that we heard news of the first tower's collapse. we watched people running in the streets and the massive cloud of dust and smoke that filled the air, obscuring even the buildings across the street. and later i walked through the aftermath ... even half a mile away the dust on the ground was three inches thick ... we had to cover our mouths with cloth or we'd choke on the dust that filled the air. there were shoes abandoned in the street where people had been running. there were burnt papers from the offices of the world trade center littering the streets.

cool! ran with roj again this morning. i thought for a while that expecting to keep up with him once a week was a pipe-dream, but this morning wasn't too bad, and we knocked 30 seconds off last week's time. maybe ... just maybe ... a 4 hour marathon is within my grasp ...

PHEW! hard weekend training. on paper it doesn't look that hard at all, but my legs are telling me it was! it began on saturday night at 8pm with a night-time trail-run / navigation session with the NYARA. the idea was to find 7 checkpoints under imitation race conditions. we were pretty stunned to walk straight into each of the first 5 cps with no problem whatsoever - thanks to roj's altimeter and our compass-readings (in case you haven't been upstate, you'll realise that this is harder than it sounds since the area is completely covered in thick woodland). even getting the cps exactly right, and going pretty fast, we found we were only getting within 5 minutes or so of each checkpoint cutoff time ... so when we failed to find cp6, we knew it was pretty much game-over. we got back to base at around 1.15am after an exhilarating and pretty frustrating time in the dark (our Petzl Duo headtorches performed brilliantly!).

on sunday we decided to go for a bike-ride from Hoboken, NJ up under the George Washington bridge along the Palisades cliffs. beautiful weather, great road (not much traffic, not many tourists - dodgy surface but didn't mind). i finally made roj try out my road bike on our second try up the biggest hill we could find (now he realises why my legs hurt more than his!). great ride - totalled about 50 miles on some pretty hilly land. obviously sven would put us to shame, but for us it wasn't bad going ...

then yesterday morning i did a 2-hour run round Central Park which was soooo painful (yes ... i used the same muscles upstate on saturday night and getting out of the saddle on the hills on sunday, so they were pretty much shot). quite pleased not to cop-out halfway though since the route passes by the park home-exit after an hour. very tempting!

generally a great weekend. bought lots of gear for the adventure race too ... and a Camelback Blowfish which is an awesome little day-sac with a 3 litre bladder. perfick!

back to work though now ... thank goodness this is a four-day week!!