89 Days Till the 2006 NYC Marathon!

It's nothing like what the weather will be like in November, but it's never too early to train for the NYC Marathon. Deena Kastor, who won a bronze medal at the 2004 Olympics for the marathon and who happens to hold the American record for the women's marathon - 2:19.36 - after running this year's London Marathon, is in New York to train. And even in this gross weather, she's out running and talking to the NY Times about strategies, like breaking up the marathon into eight parts because there are eight water stations and just knowing as much about the course as possible. Kastor finished sixth in 2001 and dropped out at mile 16 in 2004, but she's training hard for this year's race. And in case you were wondering, people running on November 5's race should have started training already (Runner's World has a 16 week plan), although P. Diddy only trained for 8 weeks before the 2003 race and finished in under 4 hours.

Two cute things we noticed: The Times article was written by Gina Kolata, who had help from Stefan Kolata, who we imagine is her son and a runner himself. Second, the ING NYC Marathon website has a separate website for UK runners - we'll see if words like "dust bin" and "lorry" are used. And last year, Paul Tergat won the men's and Jelena Prokopcuka won the women's races.