Five with Jamie

JF is in town for a few days, catching up with friends and taking some meetings with her publishers. She invited me to lunch, and I countered with a morning run in Central Park. We met Wednesday in Columbus Circle at 7 AM. I was stunned at how light it was, since when I entered the subway from my gym in Rockefeller Center just 20 minutes earlier it was still dark. There was a promise in that sunlight, and I thought Let the day unfold.

JF is the author of Running from the Devil, a thriller set in the Columbia jungles, in which a female ultrarunner (and chemist) must rescue a planeful of passengers from the FARC and destroy the last vestiges of a deadly plant before it can be harvested for a chemical weapon. Finally someone has recognized that sprinters (the Flash) and ultradistance runners alike can be superheroes (Usain and Meb can both fight crime)! And of course, it is very refreshing to have a woman save the day, instead of the usual male ex-FBI agent, private spy, or rogue detective.

JF and I, while we are super women we are not Wonder Woman (sorry to have disillusioned you all), so we chatted and ran at a leisurely 9-minute-per-mile pace. JF is fast–she competed in the Indoor Masters Championships last year in the 5k–but graciously slowed it down for me. It was a chilly morning but after a few miles we were toasty. We talked a bit about her next book–Somali pirates and more chemical weapons–which opens with an exciting race to the finish of the Comrades Marathon in South Africa. It’s being published in Summer 2010, and I can’t wait.

Central Park is in glorious these days, her trees and bushes aflame with their yellow, orange and red leaves. Through the half-naked branches we caught glimpses of the Guggenheim, the Met, the Reservoir. I pointed out Cat Hill–we ran down it as we were moving clockwise around the lower 5-mile loop. We finished our run back where we started, just in time to avoid the morning rush of traffic that picks up even in the park.