It’s a winter wonderland here in Brooklyn, with around 4 or 5 inches shoveled off the sidewalk as of around 16:00 local time. As I was telling someone who lives in the outer suburbs, where he said the usual panic buying descended on all area supermarkets, people here in the Big City tend to be cooler about all this.
I mean… cool. Over 2,000 other maniacs joined me at the start (and evidently, at the finish) of Central Park’s “Frostbite Seven” (that’s 7 miles). Just looking at the starting temperature (nine degrees Fahrenheit) makes me smile… thanks to a light wind, and lotsa layers, a relatively comfortable run… weather conditions did prevent all but the best cold weather runners from running at personal bests… No matter. We’re cool in this town. Cooler, probably than… anybody in any red states I can think of… Why are we so cool?
Why? 9-11. That’s why. (That, and public transportation… but I digress…) We suffered the hit of 9-11. We dealt with it. We did our mourning, we did our panicking, we did our coping, and life went on. Life went on here even as the rest of the country– which, save places like Oklahoma City, will hopefully never experience anything like it– but then got the vapors and decided that “nothing will ever be the same again”, and then finally gave into the kind of fear that let the nation reelect a would be martinet who masquerades in ersatz military uniforms and spouts off about freedom while snipers sit on the roofs of the Capitol, White House and other government buildings and thousands of visored riot police stand ready to gun down citizens.
Anyway… we’re cool. And many of the rest of you aren’t. So we had a blackout in ’03… and everybody just walked home, or drove home, or whatever… no looting, no end of world, no disorder… why? That’s right. We’re cool. We’ve been to hell before, and we’re still here. So… bad things happen… surely they do. Weather can be a killer, as we constantly learn.
Now, it’s a blizzard. In short, sleet happens. At least we’ll be cool about it.
tdog
Absolutely agreed. Nothing stops New Yorkers. You can slow’em down a bit, but you can’t stop’em. Mr. A. is an extreme commuter to NYC, so I have to add that commuters are a pretty hardy breed too. But a run in this weather? Now, that’s optional. Insanely optional.