On this cold and wet night before Christmas, six members of the Westchester Track Club gathered, as they do most winter nights, at their local Bally's Total Fitness club on West 231st Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx.
This was their second workout of the day; earlier, they met at Central Park to run long. They were here to run fast, and to find an alternative to pounding it out in the snow for their daily double workout.
Genna Ketebo is preparing for his next marathon in January in Carlsbad, California. Abiyot Endale and Kassahun Kabiso areplanning on taking a road trip to Boston over the next weekend to run a 5K and half-marathon, respectively.
If you've ever been intimidated while running on a treadmill, you can imagine how the other locals might feel when these sub-5-minute milers are training next to them. In case you wondered, they're doing above a grade 13 on the treadmill (as in, 13 or more miles per hour!), and they do it for a l-o-n-g time. Remembering my spin class earlier in the day, it dawned on me how that would be a warm-up for these guys. Let's just say I was glad to have my photographic responsibilities to tend to when they asked me to jump on a treadmill too.
Before they could finish their workout, a heavyset guy in one of those latex "fat suits" that help you sweat more came over, stared at the guys for a few minutes, and then used his fist to hit the "stop" button on one of the Ethiopian's treadmills, in the middle of a 4:38 mile. He simultaneously shouted that it was his right because the African runner hadn't signed up for the equipment...even though there were at least ten other treadmills open. The guys, without so much as a word, simply moved on to weights and bikes at that point. Again, good thing I had something else to be doing or I would have pulled the plug on that guys run in no time. Jerk.
More photos can be found on my flickr page.
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4:38 on a tread mill is really something
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