One of the things Delilah, like many other year-round NYC runners, most looks forward to about the advent of spring is that all the drinking fountains go back on in Central Park. This particular drinking fountain, located by the east drive around 100th Street, is one of the few that is actually supposed to be on all through the winter. It’s not always, but it is sometimes.

Yay!!

Delilah stops to pay respects to Fred Lebow, founder of the NYC Marathon. That was in 1970. There were 55 finishers, and they ran 4 loops of Central Park.  Fred Lebow believed that running was a sport for everyone: with that in mind, he oversaw the expansion of the marathon into the 5-borough celebration of NYC, and of runners of every level of ability, that it is today.

Delilah also visits the eponymous Cat of Cat Hill. Many runners dislike the Cat. They feel the Cat judges them. Delilah thinks: yet again, an unsmiling creature is misunderstood. The Cat does not judge. The Cat does not care that much.

Here is Delilah preparing for a race. This involves getting up on a Sunday before dawn. She carefully studies her route map: the start of the race is in another borough, and she has to make sure she knows where she’s going.

She makes sure she has everything she needs: her race number affixed to her shirt, and sports beans for energy during the race. She figures two should be enough.

Some dynamic stretching is important.

And she’s off!

Delilah always remembers the best advice she has ever heard about running: put one foot in front of the other. Repeat. Spend your energy moving forward, rather than up and down or side to side.

Here she is post-race:

And here. Running has its rewards.

Delilah herself is made out of an old pair of pants. This fabric attracts lint like nobody’s business. I remembered that I felt the same way when I wore the pants. Why would anyone make pants out of fabric that is a magnet for lint?

Delilah’s running pants are made from fabric from my friend Bernice. Her shoes are made from a pink bag that said “Florida grapefruit” on it, and I have no clue where it came from. The blue designs on the sides of the shoes are cut from a yarmulke from the wedding of Ghena and Jeffrey. Her headband is the top of a sock, and her mittens (with palms that would allow her to use her cell phone if she had a cell phone) are cut from a glove.

Delilah’s top is cut from a neckwarmer that I got free from the New York Road Runners’ Club on Global Running Day last year. Neckwarmers are great. They keep your neck warm and you can also blow your nose into them. Consequently they don’t generally last more than one season. So anyway I really wanted to use this for Delilah’s top, and I figured the cold weather was over so it would really be ok to cut up the neckwarmer. HA HA HA HA! When I ran this race sans neckwarmer I had several opportunities to rue this rash act.

Which brings me to an interesting question: have I violated my own rule about only using discarded items if I discard something that I ordinarily wouldn’t discard just because I want to use it for the stitch faces? What if I buy a pair of socks because I think they’d make a great stitch face sweater and then I wear them very aggressively in order to make a hole in the heel?

In running, it doesn’t matter whether you come in first, in the middle of the pack, or last. You can say, “I have finished.” There is a lot of satisfaction in that.

—Fred Lebow