Running sprints at a steep angle can do a lot. “Adding a hill or a grade forces gravity to work more,” says Brian MacKenzie, author of . “You place more load on what you're doing. That requires you to run more mechanically efficiently and it requires more out of your cardiorespiratory system.”

It’s strength training without the weights, and then some. Hill sprints help strengthen lower back muscles, glutes, hamstrings, quads, and calves, while training VO2 max and increasing top-end speed. The added muscle and improved efficiency should help reduce the risk of injury and improve times for that upcoming winter marathon or cross country ski race. Here’s how to do them right.

Find Your Spot

Coach of the Run S.M.A.R.T. Project suggests nothing longer than 600 meters. That's a long hill. The Boston Marathon's is roughly 600 meters at a 4.5 percent grade. To get the benefits of hill sprints, you’ll need a spot with a minimum four percent grade and a max of 25 percent. Start on a hill with a minimum six percent grade, which should force proper running mechanics by making you lean forward and run over your feet. Go to a treadmill and raise the grade to six percent if you’re having trouble imagining the angle.

Set Time and Distance

Five percent of an athlete's total weekly mileage should be taken up by sprints, according to Daniels. Someone running 30 miles a week should run hill sprints for 1.5 of those miles. It's similar in theory and practice to speedwork on a track. Daniels says 200-meter sprints are a good distance for beginners because they are long enough to get a solid workout but short enough to maintain proper form. MacKenzie suggests planning workouts based on time. Start by sprinting up an eight to 12-percent grade for 45 seconds at between 70 to 80 percent of full effort. On a steeper hill, he advocates for 10- to 15-seconds sprints at 90 to 100 percent effort. Holding proper form is more difficult on a steeper hill, so you want to run for a shorter period of time.

Sweat the Technique

Perfect form requires shorter strides than normal 5k race pace. The steeper the hill, the shorter the strides should be. Keep your torso upright. Pump your arms quickly to help generate and maintain upward momentum. The balls of your feet should hit directly under your chest. You're running wrong if your quads start quivering, your foot gets out in front of your chest, your heel strikes first, or your torso slumps forward past your knees. If your form breaks down at any point, stop. Improper technique, aside from leading to injury, can reduce the benefits of a hill sprint. “If you are doing heel striking or other unfavorable stuff, you have to work harder and will get shut down sooner,” MacKenzie says.

Take Time Off

For every one second you sprint, recover for three seconds. “I also have them do downhill [which increases stride turnover],” MacKenzie says. Lean forward with your vision focused on the bottom and work on a mid-foot strike. Control your speed by shortening your stride, not by fighting gravity, leaning back, and landing on your heel. Start with three or four sprints up and down. “Run hard up,” MacKenzie says. “Recover. Run hard down. Recover. Repeat.”

Switch Things Up

After a few weeks, you should notice your fitness increasing, your breathing getting easier for longer, and your leg muscles growing. Daniels suggests only increasing distance every third or fourth week. “Don't run six one week, then seven the next week, and then eight,” he says. “Run six for a few weeks, then go to 10. You want to let the body adjust to a certain amount of stress before you increase the stress.”

MacKenzie offers another way to know when to increase your workout. If you start out running his recommended grade of eight to 12 percent for 45 seconds, pay attention to distance. When you start exceeding the initial distance by 15 percent, increase the steepness of the hill by two to four percent or increase the amount of time you are running by 10 seconds. If neither option is available, MacKenzie says to decrease the recovery time to two and a half to one, then two to one.         

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According to New York City Internet lore (read: ), the route that would become Broadway first appeared on the island of Manhattan in 1642, but it wouldn’t take its current form until nearly 250 years later on February 14, 1899. Fast forward another 100 and some odd years, and you would find two hearty souls running down the length of it on a cold, windy, very-much-about-to-rain late morning in March. The plan—to travel from the top of the island at 215th Street to the bottom at Bowling Green—seemed like a good idea, in theory, the night before. In practice, it was, too—although boy, it got a little dicey when we lost the street.

ON TUESDAY NIGHT, IT took Bill Bradley less than 10 minutes to reply in the affirmative to my email (subject: “Really short notice, and also ridiculous”) asking if he wanted to run down Broadway with me 16 hours later. He was in, forecast for strong winds, rain, and possible snow be damned. We planned to meet at 10:30 a.m. the next morning for the 13-mile run down one of the country’s most crammed streets—come hell or high water. I checked the weather report one more time before going to sleep. Smart money was on high water.

The 9:42 a.m. Wednesday morning A train from Jay Street­–Metrotech that arrived at 9:44 a.m. was half filled with straggling commuters focused on their iPhones and earbuds, their tablets and Talk of the Town columns. A placard advertisement above their oblivious heads suggested I go “From Bronx to bronzed,” featured two happy, bronzed stand-up paddleboarders, and listed a website for the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. They seemed happy-ish. No one else on the train did. I was wearing shorts, wool socks, my least water-absorbent long-sleeve shirt, and a black running skull cap. We all looked ridiculous in our ways, commuting toward something. I took my phone out and started reading.

Fifty minutes later at the Dyckman stop, the A train stopped for a reason that was possibly known to the conductor but not shared with any of his dwindling passengers. After five minutes of waiting, I decided to get out and walk the seven blocks north, but I ran into Bradley in the station. He had the same idea. We shook hands, then made the executive decision to start the run from 200th.

After a quick check of the phone for orienteering purposes—eat your heart out, Dutch explorer David de Vries who first mentioned the road that would become Broadway in a journal entry more than 350 years earlier—we set out on our journey. It was not raining, but the 41 degrees felt like 31, thanks to the 25mph wind out of the ENE, which happened to be perfectly aimed to push us toward our destination 230 or so blocks away. You win some, you lose some. We fell into an easy jog, shooting for nine-minute miles or so.

Almost immediately, we hit a long, gradual uphill. In fact, the first 100 or so blocks are one long set of rolling peaks and valleys, the type of topography that makes you realize you would have to think long and hard about where to put your defenses if you were a Revolutionary War general defending the city. This is less relevant now that the streets are lined with bodegas and not cannons, but it’s still kind of a pain in the ass, and it makes for difficult pacing, something with which I struggle even on flat surfaces. I kept unwittingly pushing the pace, which wasn’t fair. Bradley, who is training for a half marathon, had done a track workout the previous night because he’s nuts. His legs were sore. On the other hand, I had eaten some very excellent thai ribs and watched a Celtics game. My legs felt fine. . My bad. Sorry Bill. I blame the wind.

I thought the constant presence of the numbered street signs would get tedious, little 1/20th mile markers from hell, but I mostly forgot about them and was surprised by how rapidly they had decreased when I did look up to check where we were. Columbia University came and went. At some point, it started drizzling, but nothing more. (Brick Tamland, wrong again.) We kept going, running and talking like two guys out for a long training run. Which, of course, is exactly what we were doing. We just happened to be running through the center of Manhattan in the middle of a workday. There were fewer people out than I expected—in this regard, the weather probably helped—but we had to stop once every 10 or 15 blocks to wait for the light to change and dodge some understandably unsuspecting shoppers. But otherwise, the expedition was going well.

Then, we got lost.

“WE’RE ON 8TH AVENUE,” my running partner noticed as we crossed 47th Street.

You might think that following a major road would be a simple task, but Broadway cuts through Manhattan in strange ways. It intersects with avenues in massive, uncrossable intersections, then continues off at an acute angle. There are cars and people and chaos, and sometimes you lose your way.

Fifteen blocks earlier in Columbus Circle, we had paused so Bradley could take a picture and I could stand and awkwardly whisper a few notes into my phone. After a brief respite, we continued south, not realizing that we were on the wrong street. Luckily, it was a quick fix. Broadway was a few hundred feet to our left, just west of 7th Avenue. A detour down 47th and we were back on track, just in time for Times Square.

When I conceived of the Broadway Run idea, Times Square was one of my concerns. All the people, all the insanity, all the men trying to sell Bus Tours of Manhattan. But it was actually one of the most pleasant parts of the journey because there were no cars. In 2009, New York City banned vehicles on Broadway between 47th and 42nd—also, in Herald Square between 35th and 33rd—and it’s lovely for a runner. You have dodge your fair share of tourists, but you do that everywhere.

Pushing on, we avoided a near fight at 28th Street, then hit Union Square—8.95 miles—around the 80-minute mark. A teenage skate rat hanging out by the subway station entrance serenaded us with the Rocky theme song. I was tempted to raise my arms as I ran down a nearby four-stair staircase. I did not; I wouldn’t want to look weird. Further south, the clueless NYU students walked in lazy, remarkably un-straight lines as they focused on their phones. We avoided them by zigging into the street, then zagging back to the sidewalk. The first uphill in what seemed like forever arrived between 6th and Houston. We were getting close.

In Soho, a woman in a bright shirt with a logo I couldn’t make out handed me a bottle of a drink she was being paid to hock. I was too tired and powerless to resist. . One releases this magical formula by twisting the cap, at which point a cloud of red kiwi strawberry flavor mixes into the clear water. This task proved rather difficult to accomplish while running, but I managed. After 11 miles, watching the mixture was equal parts gross and fascinating.

We reached the Financial District and decided to end the run at the Wall Street bull, just north of Broadway’s inevitable conclusion. We went into tourist mode and took a picture of the iconic statue. In total, the run covered 11.35 miles and took 1:44:19. I opened the 989 and took a sip. It was sweet, perhaps too sweet. It wasn’t terrible, but I’m not sure I’d drink it again.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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Chris Hawson didn’t run much in New York City until he took off his shoes. That was three years, and more than 9,000 miles, ago.

Three years later, he runs either entirely barefoot, in VFFs, or in the Altra Adams he’s wearing when we talk, and he hasn’t missed a day due to injury. Perhaps more impressive is the fact that over the past two years he hasn’t missed a month doing at least one barefoot run on the streets of New York. We met on a Monday—less than 10 days after Superstorm Nemo dropped 10 inches of snow on the city—and he had jogged home barefoot the previous Friday evening dodging the occasional pile of plowed snow. His barefoot mileage is down this winter, which has been quite cold, but he gets out when he can. Still, even he has his limits. “I have friends in Winnipeg and they will go running in -34. I’m not going to play that game.”

WHEN HAWSON IS BAREFOOT, he gets strange looks running to and from work and his home on the Upper West Side—through Central Park and down Madison Avenue—but that’s just fine with him. The reactions run the gamut. “Last spring, one girl went ‘ew, ew, ew,’ but half a mile later, there were four guys walking down toward me on Fifth Ave. and they thought it was cool,” he says. “They wanted to know how far I was going.”

The community of barefoot runners in New York is small—it peaked during the Born to Run craze and has tapered off since—but committed. There’s that holds informal runs every week, and a handful of people turn out on summer nights. Interestingly, Hawson says it’s mostly beginners. Occasional more prestigious without–shoe events draw larger crowds. It will always remain a niche subset, a very niche one, but it’s not going away.

New York, of course, is not the cleanest place in the world, so I asked Hawson how he avoided dangerous detritus on the streets. “As I told my mother, I’ve taken my shoes off my feet but my eyes are still in my head,” he says. “I’ve really had next to no issues. I had one piece of glass that slowed me down for a couple of days. I picked that up during a thunderstorm. I couldn’t see anything because there were so many reflections. But otherwise, pretty much everything has either brushed off or been picked out in a few seconds. I think I counted 11 pieces by the end of my first 5,000 miles.”

(Playing Devil’s Advocate, that’s still 11 pieces of glass in your foot.)

But the positives outweigh the negatives for Hawson. Barefoot running sounds a lot like traditional running, only with a forced focus on technique. “You have to pick your foot up and put it down,” he says. “If you slide and scrape, you’ll get blisters or worse.” 

For Hawson, the reasons to take off the kicks and place foot to pavement are simple: “It’s fun. It’s different. And it keeps me young.”

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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Avalo York used to own the Central Park bike loop, but he’s more or less an anonymous figure these days, especially on the weekends when the masses, with their $10,000-bikes and their zero institutional knowledge, descend to ride the six-mile circuit. He’s one of the last of the old-school riders, a breed of athlete you rarely find flying around the drive anymore. But a few people know who he is. And those who do, they understand what a treasure the unassuming man is.

“Avalo is the only rider in the city that I’m comfortable riding with,” says John Eustice, one of the first Americans to race in Europe, “He’s the only guy who rides like a pro. The only one. He knows how to ride. He doesn’t half-wheel. If you bump him, he doesn’t panic. He knows all the unwritten rules of how to be and how not to be.”

York got his start on a bike when he was 14, trading his tape recorder for a fixed-gear track bike. He started riding around the park with his brother and another friend, and they eventually found their way to the famed . The trio came home from Queens early one morning, found a race in the park, and entered. York finished third. He kept racing between 1976 and 1981, joining outfits like Team Brooklyn and a Harlem-based crew sponsored in part by Muhammed Ali. (“I met him. He contributed some money.”) After York “did well” during a race in Allentown, he was approached to be part of the Shimano team, one of the biggest in the country, but they never got sponsorship for an outfit in New York City, so nothing came of it. “If that would have happened, York told me, while he drank a fruit tea at an Upper West Side coffee shop, “my life would have changed in cycling. I would have had team support.”

Instead, he continued on the semi-pro circuit, traveling to Milwaukee one weekend, Delaware the next, and somewhere in the Carolinas for the one after that. He became a cult figure in Central Park, always riding, always racing, always laughing, always doing well. York’s form was impeccable, a product of thousands of hours spent in the saddle. “He just looks like a professional,” Eustice says. There were nationals, Pan-Am trials, and other big events. York placed highly in many of them, but never broke through. It was a brutal schedule, and eventually it got to be too much. “I quit the sport when the pro culture started to get here,” the excruciatingly modest man says. “We were racing for components. When I quit, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything.”

His relationship to the sport also changed. “When I started, it was about personal discovery. I got to a certain level and I stopped learning. You get a little arrogant and you stop discovering,” he says. “In the last 10 years, I’m learning again. You slow down, you back away from it, and you realize that all that effort was kind of in vain.”

TODAY, HE’S NEARLY AS slight as he was during his high point as a racer when he checked in just north of 140 pounds. York no longer needs to be ready for the start of the March racing season, which means he can take it easy in the winter. But during the warmer months, he hits Central Park between five and seven times a week. He frequently takes the weekends off, turned away by the crowds. 

When he really wants to get away, he’ll head “over the bridge,” off the island of Manhattan. It’s just him and the bike. “I go alone. I can stick to my own plans,” he says. “I go slow: 13-16 miles per hour. That’s where the real discipline comes in.” This is the Zen of Avalo, a faraway world from the speed-demon riding of his youth or the testosterone-charged racing that currently takes place in Central Park. York, who recently got into Johan Sebastian Bach, took violin lessons for a brief time. His teacher told him to always play slowly because anything he could do slowly, he could speed up as needed. He took that advice to heart with his cycling as well. He watches riders do early season hill repeats, intervals, and sprints, knowing it’s all a waste until they put in the long slow miles.

York, who does marble and tile installation and only works for himself, sometimes trains riders, but while he likes the money, he finds another aspect of training tedious. “You wind up becoming a surrogate therapist. You hear a lot of stories. A lot of times people need to vent. I was fine with it, but if you’re riding with people two and three times a week, it gets to be a lot.” There’s another reason, too: “When you start going over the bridge and going upstate, it reminds me so much of racing.” If he’s not doing it on his own terms, he doesn’t want to do it at all. 

After almost 40 years in the city’s riding scene, he’s seen plenty of changes, not many of them good. “Riders today are riding 12,000-14,000 miles a year. Do you know how much time of your life that is? If you do that for a hobby, that’s disturbed,” he says, laughing. “I do it for fun. When I go to the park, I have no agenda.” 

And so, he cruises around Central Park on his own time and schedule, and at his own pace, happily anonymous. 

“Some people know him, but they aren’t very interested in the past,” Eustice says. “He’s a good egg, that guy.”

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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Last February, Germany’s Thomas Dold beat out nearly 700 competitors and won the 35th annual in a time of 10 minutes and 28 seconds. The race, which goes from the ground level of the famous New York City building to the observation deck on the 86th floor, spans 1,050 vertical feet and 1,576 steps. Dold’s victory was his seventh-straight.

Patrick Halloran finished well behind the German. In fact, he finished well behind the vast majority of the climbers. The 60-year-old Georgia-based construction businessman spent more than an hour-and-a -quarter trekking from the bottom to the top. His time, 1:15:17, made him the slowest of the 670-plus people who started the race. Still, he finished, an impressive accomplishment for a man five years removed from a heart attack and two out from suffering a three-inch cut in his esophagus that left him in the intensive care unit for three weeks. Halloran, however, thinks he could have done better.

“I was certain I would be able to do it in 30 to 50 minutes, but it just didn’t work out,” he told me over the phone. “I was proud to be able to finish.” The ex-military man had to stop every three or four floors to catch his breath for a minute or so. Despite the struggle, he kept going up and up and up.

“Your heart is beating out of your chest,” he said, laughing. “You talk about a stress test, that’s a stress test.”

THE RACE, ORGANIZED BY the New York Road Runners and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, attracts all types of competitors. The inaugural event took place in 1978 and was won by New York firefighter Gary Muhrcke, who won the first-ever New York City Marathon eight years prior. There is the elite group of hardcore tower-running specialists, men like Dold, who is also a record-holding backward-runner, or Australian bike racing pro and Run-Up record-holder (9:33 in 2003) Paul Crake, who travel the world searching for tall buildings to ascend. “They look like they are out of Mogadishu. They could run from one side of Africa to the other,” Halloran said. “They were going by me like I was a turtle.”

But the majority of the participants have no designs on winning; they merely hope to complete the vertical trek. While most times are in the 20- to 40-minute range, Halloran wasn’t last by too much. .

As you might imagine, being at the back of the pack has its decided disadvantages. “It’s hot. They say it’s only 65 to 68 degrees, but they are full of crap,” Halloran said. “The further you get up there, the hotter it gets. That may just be because your heart’s beating so fast, but it gets hot and stuffy. The smell gets pretty nasty because you’ve got 500 people who are sweating and spitting. Being the last guy, you’re eating a lot of crow.” 

Despite the heat, the stench, and the disappointing finish, he’s returning for another year. Next week, Halloran and hundreds of other competitors will once again take to the stairs. The Georgia man is determined to show better in his second attempt and has been training even harder. Halloran spends time training in a four-story parking garage in town, going up and down in an effort to mimic the conditions. (Small southern cities are not known for their skyscrapers.) His 2012 workout totals: 1,562 miles walked; 472 miles on a spinner bike “as hard as I could”; 2,253 minutes on a Bowflex Treadclimber; 2,601 deep knee squats; alighted 2,777 flights of stairs. 

“It’s going to kick anybody’s ass, I don’t care who you are,” he said. “But I hope it doesn’t kick mine as much as it did last year.” 

His goal is to make the climb in under an hour and, hopefully, not finish last. The difficulty starts after the 40th or 50th floor, when the body is exhausted and the oxygen becomes scarce. But this ordeal is more about the path than the result. The race provides motivation to get into shape and to stay there, although, Halloran says, it’s not the only reason he works out. “I’m doing these exercises because of myself. Anybody can do it. All you gotta do is start.” 

Still, Halloran is looking forward to the end of the journey: “On February 7, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world. I’m sick to death of training. My ankles hurt. My knees hurt.”

Pain is temporary; aping King Kong is forever.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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Michael Arnstein and I are wandering aimlessly through the chaos of the Grand Street markets in New York City’s Chinatown. Actually, check that: I am confused and disoriented, overwhelmed by the crush of vendors, shoppers, tourists, and locals using the thoroughfare to get somewhere else. But where I see a mass of unorganized, unexplainable, unpredictable humanity, my guide sees breakfast. And lunch and dinner. Also: snacks in between meals. And juice.

A lot of fruit at the Grand Street markets in Chinatown.

Michael Arnstein inspects more fruit.

Five years ago, Arnstein—one of the best 100-mile runners in the country—became a fruitarian. “I read a book on low-fat raw fruit diet, based on fruits and vegetables,” the slight runner says a few feet from a street-side stand brimming with apples, oranges, pomegranates, mangos, and other unidentifiable-but-colorful fare. “It changed everything about me, almost overnight. I went really hardcore about it.” The cardboard signs are in Chinese, except for the prices. Those are in regular old Arabic numerals. “I’ve become a super athlete based on just eating fruits and vegetables.”

Arnstein, who finished 29th in the 2011 New York City Marathon, currently consumes 30 pounds of fruit daily, enough to fuel the 15-mile run he does twice a day between his midtown Manhattan office and his house on the border of the Bronx and Westchester County. After starting the diet, he learned that Chinatown boasted the best selection of fruits in the city. Individual vendors have more than two-dozen different options, even now in mid-January. He agreed to show me around his favorite spots, even though he no longer shops here. After a few years of buying retail, Arnstein realized the vendors must purchase their fruit from somewhere bigger. He located the wholesaler’s shop in Queens, near the Kosciuszko Bridge, and goes once every two weeks to stock up. His home has four fridges.

THE RUNNER ARRIVES IN Chinatown as he arrives almost everywhere: by running. He is wearing the typical New York-distance-runner-in-the-winter uniform: a hat, a long-sleeve shirt from a marathon, tights, and gloves. I don’t know how far he ran to reach lower Manhattan, but he doesn’t appear even a little bit winded. Arnstein is slight in the way that good marathoners are—all taut skin and sinewy muscle; it’s a body tuned to go rapidly forward, one step at a time, for hours on end—and he speaks with the energy of a rambunctious four-year-old or an adult who knows about a secret lifestyle of which you are unaware.

It’s because he does. The man, who says he was raised on McDonald’s, was a solid ultrarunner before taking up fruitarianism. Now, he’s elite. “I just ran 100 miles in 12 hours, 57 minutes. I’m in the top 10 all time, ever,” Arnstein says, sounding astonished at his own fruit-fueled capacity. (During long runs he munches on dates or Maltadextrin gels, which is pretty much the only time he’s not eating 100-percent raw fruit.) “How do you run 100 miles and do the last 10 miles in an hour and six minutes? Mile 90, I’m running 6:30s. It’s crazy. Look at these Asian pears! Crazy!”

He knows his fruits. A brief guided tour:

SATSUMA ORANGES: “Super, super sweet. Really easy to peel. You have to eat them when they are at peak sweetness. In terms of oranges, as a fruitarian, this is my all time favorite orange. I’ve been eating cases and cases of these for the last month.”

SHARON FRUITS: “They are flown in from Israel. When they are soft, they are one of the sweetest fruits you can eat. Available for six weeks out of the year. Exceptional, awesome fruit, but you gotta eat it when it’s ripe.”

DRAGONFRUIT: “Without question, the most attractive looking fruit. The plant, by design, makes the fruit look attractive. We are attracted to bright colors. It doesn’t have a lot of taste, though. I like to buy it just to look at it.”

Plus many more species you won’t find at Trader Joe’s. It’s a market issue, supply and demand at its most basic. Arnstein points to a fruit that is sold in Chinatown and, perhaps, only Chinatown. “There’s not a big industry in the starfruit business,” he says, which is ironic seeing as he eats enough fruit to nearly singlehandedly create an industry himself.

THEN THERE’S DURIAN. THE “King of Fruit”—which grows on trees in some southeast Asian countries, is frozen, and shipped to the Untied States—looks like something out a Guillermo del Toro film: its shell covered in dramatic, imposing spikes. The flesh, boasting an absurd 30-percent fat content, sits hidden in pods under the surface, and its unavoidable odor emanates through the skin. “Most people consider the smell either offensive or heavenly. People love durian or they want to die,” Arnstein says. “If you try a good one the first time, most people are hooked on it.” 

Arnstein spends 10 minutes picking through the thawing specimens in an attempt to find a “good one.” He consults the vendor, who is helpful because he’d like for us to purchase one of the $2.50-per-pound objects, not because he cares whether we achieve our goal or not. Arnstein, reluctantly, settles on a five-pound specimen that looks acceptable, but you never know until you open it. He does; we eat.

It’s disappointing, a “five out of 10, a two out of 10 on the consistency of the flesh.” Arnstein asks whether the vendor, eyeing us strangely as we consume the just-purchased durian at his stand, gets any from Malaysia. Those are the best, it seems, a fact I take on face value. They come on Monday and cost $7.50 per pound, which brings up another issue with the fruitarian lifestyle. Namely: “You gotta be rich to eat this way. Who’s going to come down here and spend $50 a day on really high-quality fruit?” Arnstein asks this to no one in particular a few minutes after pointing out another type of fruit that runs $6 for two. The cost is one of the factors that drove Arnstein from Chinatown to the wholesaler in Queens. It can add up quickly, especially in the winter when prices rise.

When I wonder about protein, as in where, exactly, does a fruitarian get it, Arnstein has a prepared, passionate, complex response to the “number-one question people ask.” The simplified version is that protein consists of amino acids, which are found in fruit and vegetables. To get nutrients from protein, our bodies need to break it down into amino acids, then build it back up again. Eating fruit skips that digestive step. Studies show that people with diets that are high in fruit produce less stomach acid. 

Fruitarianism is a growing trend, says Arnstein, who has seen it first-hand. “In five years, fruitarianism is going to be the new vegan. I’m fanatical about it because the shit works,” he says. “It’s incredible. It changes everything, man. Your shit doesn’t stink, literally. Your thought processes. Your moods. Your body odor. Everything. I think it’s going to grow. I really do.”

BY NOW, WE’VE MOVED across the street to another vendor. This one, Arnstein says, is cheaper because it’s further from Bowery. Location, location, location applies to unusual diets as well, apparently. We poke around, examining fruit that might be a little beaten up but tastes better than your average supermarket fare. In this world, appearance can be deceiving. We cross the street and keep talking about fruit.

After a few minutes, Arnstein looks at the stand we left. I look, too. The oranges, mega apples, starfruit, and mangos look back. It’s a peaceful moment in the chaos of Chinatown. “This is health food,” he says, partially to me, partially to anyone else who might be listening. It’s unnecessary evangelism. Arnstein is a living, breathing, running example that fruitarianism works.

Then, the runner has to go. He is shivering, freezing because his eating and exercise habits leave almost no fat on his body. “That’s a problem with this diet,” he offers, as if this isn’t a problem most people would love to have. Arnstein shakes my hand, steals one final glance toward the stand, smiles, then turns and jogs up Forsyth Street.

I stay. There is still fruit to buy.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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“NYC Bound” is a new biweekly column in which Brooklyn resident Noah Davis—see, he’s bound (confined) in New York, but these are also things you can do if you go (bound) to New York, and a lot of these activities involve human beings doing some kind of bounding—examines how one lives the active and adventure lifestyle while also living in the America’s biggest, most city-ish city.

So that’s where I left my water.

Patrick Parish of Circle Pines, Minnesota, broke the hour mark en route to winning the 2010 USA National Sprint Triathlon Championship. He completed the race—a 750m swim, 20k bike ride, and 5k run—in 59:06. I learn this fact halfway through the riding portion of my first-ever triathlon. I wanted to know what a good time was so I googled it on my iPhone. Riding, typing, and reading all at the same time is dangerous, but significantly less so for me than for Parish or the vast majority of other sprint-tri participants.

You see, I was on a stationary bike. I did the entire thing in my apartment building.

New York City residents get exercise in strange ways. Because of the physical limitations of living on a concrete island, traditional outdoor activities get brought inside. New Yorkers race up the Empire State Building. We climb in retrofitted warehouses. And some of us are lucky enough to have lap pools and a gym in our buildings so we can do a full sprint triathlon on a Friday afternoon.

THE POOL PORTION CONSISTED of 46 laps. Flip turns were not going to happen because I tend to inhale water and choke whenever I try one, so the necessity of turning around every 20 seconds negated the speed advantage of pushing off of the wall. (While searching for Parish’s time, I discovered that most pool-based sprint tris only require swims of 400 or 500 meters so as to limit the number of laps. This would have been nice to know earlier. I also need a waterproof phone.) Except for the lifeguard, I was alone the entire time. My left calf started to tighten around the 36-lap mark, but I managed to finish fine. The swim took 16 minutes and 30 seconds, hardly a record-breaking pace but not bad for someone whose entire training regimen consisted of completing one set of 30 laps the previous week to prove to himself he could make it through a half-mile. Drowning in a three-and-a-half-foot deep pool would have been so embarrassing.

Also embarrassing: Struggling into skintight Under Armour speedshorts in the locker room. Apartment-building decorum dictated that I couldn’t run into the gym located 10 feet from the pool dripping wet, so I changed. Consideration for your fellow city dwellers, however, costs time. Traditional triathletes complete the transition from the swim to the bike in between 60 and 70 seconds. It took me more than three minutes to move from the pool to the locker room to the bike. In my defense, I was carrying a plastic bag of bananas and a sopping towel. The lifeguard, understandably, looked on confused. 

“Hill Plus Level Five” seemed like an appropriately difficult and unnecessarily dramatic setting for the first ever Gold Street Apartment Building Triathlon, so I pressed a couple of buttons and started riding. Then, I realized that I needed to adjust the seat higher if I was going to be sitting on the hilariously uncomfortable not-so-soft rubber for the next 40-plus minutes. I figured I could ride at least 15 miles per hour, finishing the 12 miles in roughly three-quarters of an hour.

I went faster. Hill Plus Level Five consisted of one long, not-very-steep incline. The first mile took three minutes. The second 2:55. I was flying; I was hungry. I looked around for the pair of bananas I’d bought earlier in the day, intending to eat one of them during the ride. The well-traveled fruits were in the bag on the floor. I couldn’t reach them. They were, however, significantly closer than the water bottle I conscientiously filled before leaving my apartment and then proceeded to leave on the counter. [See picture.] It’s a complete amateur hour at this point.

With RPMs north of 120, a heart rate pushing 160, and no fuel or hydration, I started to get a little weird. I spent miles seven through 10 weighing the pros and cons of expanding the triathlon into a quadathlon featuring the elliptical. I decided against making such a move, then reached the end of 12 miles in 35:40. 

I had no idea how my legs would feel after nearly an hour of sustained effort. During the transition between the bike and the treadmill, which—somehow—took 80 seconds, I pecked out the following line on my iPhone notepad: “Legs heavy. Knees weak. Moms spaghetti. (Losing it?) lose yourself.” I was starting to fade. Three miles remaining. Seven miles per hour. One percent incline. And go.

My left leg started cramping, but I shuffled along, images of those struggling triathletes at the end of an Ironman filling my brain. I wasn’t them, not anywhere close, but this was a battle in a different way. For the biking and running portions of my own personal event, it was me and my reflection in the mirrors. That tableau gets old, quick. Running on a treadmill, a machine that limits speed and cannot be quickly re-calibrated, presents its own challenges. It forces you to set the pace at the lowest common denominator in order to avoid potential disaster. So I continued trotting along at seven-miles-per-hour even after working out the cramps, concerned that a faster pace would send me tumbling off the back of the machine if and when my leg seized up again.

A little more than 25 minutes and 400 calories later, I neared the finish line. Instead of doing the full 5k, I decided to stop after three miles, grab my stuff, run from the gym to the stairwell, then sprint up 15 flights to the roof. At least that was the intention. My right quad gave way on the landing of the ninth floor. (How do the Empire State Building racers do it?) I limped the rest of the way, still carrying the plastic bag that contained my towel, flip flops, wet boxers, goggles, two uneaten bananas, and no water bottle. I burst through the rooftop door in 1:22:55.6 and was greeted by a beautiful early-winter night. Office lights lit up lower Manhattan. Headlights illuminated the traffic-snarled BQE.

I FELT GOOD. PRESUMABLY, I was the record-holder of the Gold Street Apartment Building Triathlon Series, and possibly even the greatest Apartment Triathlete in all of Brooklyn (although not ). I finished well behind Parish’s time, but in front of the hypothetical 90-minute goal I set before I started based upon my lack of swimming experience, my lack of distance riding, and the fact that it’s difficult to run faster than 7:30 miles on a treadmill. Although, I wish I could have convinced a friend to tag along. It would have been fun to try to chase someone down on a stationary bike.

I started plotting for the next tri. Pat Parish’s time didn’t seem that far away. A couple minutes here, a few minutes there, an actual training swim or two. I’d even eat a banana and remember to bring some water. Breaking the hour mark might be impossible indoors, but the 70-minute barrier doesn’t seem unreasonable. If nothing else, I know I can make up some time in the transitions.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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Krasnodar, Russia — Russians, it would seem, do not particularly like, nor do they expect, a jogger to be trotting along the side of one of the narrow streets that wind through this city of 750,000. Admittedly, this is a rather rash generalization, but I’ve nearly been hit twice during the first five minutes of my morning run. One time, I’ll admit, was at least partially my fault. Apparently, it’s legal, or at least socially encouraged, to go right on red without making any attempt to slow down out here. Noted. But the other driver—the one in the old, dirty BMW—I would swear that dude (that comrade?) was aiming directly for me. I avoided him by jumping over a ditch onto the barely-there sidewalk, but it was touch-and-go for a couple of terrifying milliseconds.

My plane landed in this southern Russian city eight hours ago in the pitch black of the Eastern European night. It’s lighter now, but only marginally so. A thick fog replaced the inky sky around 6:30 this morning. I’m running—taking my life in my hands, or feet, or something—because I find it’s the best way to get a feel for a new place. It’s too much to say that a five-mile jog through an unfamiliar location offers any hard truths, but what, other than a sustained life in a certain place, actually does? On faster-than-walking foot you will gain plenty of initial impressions you wouldn’t in a car, a taxi cab, or any other means of transportation. Running forces you to pay attention in a very specific way, one that forces some kind of insight into your immediate situation.

Under normal circumstances, these self-psychologizing observations are generally focused inward—the zen of jogging or some such—but strange, unfamiliar territory forces you to focus on what’s around you—the different buildings, the unsuspecting local pedestrians, the unexpected cracks and bumps and depressions. It’s helpful and, quite frankly, a smarter way to run. After all, you never know when a car will come flying unexpectedly around a corner. (Pro tip: Leave your headphones home. You need all your senses about you.)

Krasnodar is cold and grey, both the buildings and the people on the streets; it’s the stuff of James Bond films and Cold War stereotypes. It’s an initial impression that is confirmed over the next 48 hours when countless citizens, or at least pretty much everyone who speaks English, ask me whether is important back home because of the non-war war our countries fought more than 20 years ago. I don’t have the heart to tell them most Americans care even less about the Cold War than they do about the beautiful game.

In Thiruvananthapuram, India, the capital city of the country’s Kerala state, however, citizens very much do care about football. They wear jerseys everywhere, Lionel Messi’s blue-and-red Barcelona kit mixing with Wayne Rooney’s only-red Manchester United top. The owners of the uniforms may support different clubs, but they are united in the quizzical looks I got while jogging through the streets on a midsummer day last year. No one does this. No one really does anything in the middle of the day. It’s too hot.

There’s also too much construction. I expected the Indian city to be bustling, a growing center of commerce like much of the rest of the country, but this is ridiculous. Workers dig up something on nearly every road. Traffic backs up and cars careen through narrow lanes. This is mid-progress—a town in transformation. The reality is even more apparent on foot where you can really feel the non-stop pulse of the change. It continues, mile after mile, turning a normally confusing network of roads into an unnavigable mass. The transition to a first-world country comes at the expense of jogging paths, it appears. Not a bad trade, except for yours truly. (It also makes recording the run in an absolute nightmare, albeit an amusing one.)

Running in strange cities helps a newcomer like myself understand the tenor of the citizens and gives some general insight into the socio-economics of a place, but it also helps with the geography. In Guatemala City, the surprisingly thin air at the high altitude was noticeable. Mexico City was even more dramatic. It took half-an-hour to regain my breath after a morning jog, although being 8,000 feet above sea level wasn’t the issue; it was the pollution and smog.

Really, what running does is it gives you a different perspective on the same place. You have no option but to observe your surroundings, to get a sense of where you are. If you do it right, you move relatively slowly but consistently down streets, across parks, and over bridges. The never-ending tableau changes faster than it does when you are walking, allowing you to cover more ground, but not in the fits, starts, and sensory depravation that comes with motorized transportation. Running might be an abnormal way to travel through a city, but for me there’s no better way to begin to understand one. It doesn’t always work, and the lessons are limited by the nature of how they are learned, but it’s effective. San Francisco, Mendoza, Honduras, etc. all made more sense more quickly than they otherwise would have. I’ll trade Lonely Planet for a long run any day.

Back in Krasnodar, I had one more main drag to cross before reaching my hotel. Instead of going alone, I waited with a elderly man in a Russian army uniform. Cars flew by. Finally, we saw an opening, and then sprinted across the street together. There’s strength in numbers. You learn something every day.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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More than eight million people call the 302-square-mile landmass containing the five boroughs of New York City home, making it the most densely-populated urban area in the United States. Were NYC a state, it would rank ahead of Virginia (42,774.2 square miles) as the 12th most populous one in the union. For that reason and many other issues that arise when many bodies are crammed into tight spaces—cars, pollution, endless roads, etc.—it is not, one might think, a great place to be an ultramarathoner. One would also be wrong.

Gotham’s ultrarunning scene has existed since in the 1960s and ’70s, and it’s exploded in popularity over the past half-decade or so. Running along the Manhattan streets with a backpack while devouring a packet of goo is the new skinny black jeans—and it’s not that surprising when you think about it. In many ways, it takes the same kind of person to enjoy endless hour-on-hour runs as it does to survive the perpetual craziness that is living in New York.

“We have so many challenges day-to-day: getting a job, an apartment, a parking space. You’re always competing—not vocally but internally—just to sustain life,” says Rich Innamorato, the founder of the Broadway Ultra Society and an ultra-race director for over 30 years. “Ultras are like that, too. It’s a private challenge. You’re not pounding your chest saying ‘look what I’m doing,’ but you’re doing it.”

Despite the city’s deserved reputation as a concrete jungle, there are plenty of places to run. The park systems connect, especially in the outer boroughs. There’s the Westside Highway and the Waterfront Greenway in Manhattan; the bike path along Pelham Parkway to Orchard Beach and City Island; the Vanderbilt Motorway that goes out to Flushing Meadows; a bike path on the Cross Island Parkway and one on the Saw Mill Parkway; the bridges in Far Rockaway; the Williamsburg/Manhattan/Brooklyn Bridge trifecta. Point being: if you look, you will find a way to run forever.

This summer, Phil McCarthy, who by running 257 miles during a 48-hour span in May 2011, did just that. He created and organized a around NYC. “I thought it would be a really good way to show off the different places in the city,” he says. “The parks, greenways, boardwalks, and bridges.” Thirty-one runners started and 14 finished the Great New York 100 Mile Running Exposition, which Keila Merino won in 21:05:55. Michael Samuels, the first male finisher, followed four minutes later. Next year, McCarthy hopes to do it again and expand the field. He’ll have plenty of interested participants.

One of the runners might be Deanna Culbreath, who volunteered to help coordinate McCarthy’s race in July. The 32-year-old is an in the ultrarunning world. Unlike many other runners who track everything, she doesn’t meticulously plan. She leaves her apartment on the Upper East Side and, well, “I usually just make up a lot of my long runs. I don’t know where I’m going to go. I just go out for four hours. Whatever. Who cares?”

And while “young woman training for race by running through New York at night” sounds like the start of a really bad slasher film, it hasn’t stopped her. “I’ll start a run at two in the morning during the work week, then go straight to work,” Culbreth says. “It works out so well mentally. It gets you ready for those long dark hours of a 100-miler when you’re out there by yourself.”

In fact, New York may be one of the safer places to exercise outdoors, whatever the time. Culbreath and her fellow ultras can almost always run with other people. The presence of so many warm bodies in a condensed area makes it tough to find a time when no one can go for a jog. Websites like Facebook and Meet Up make locating like-minded individuals with the same schedule even easier. Plus, many places in New York are well-lit 24 hours a day. The city can be a dangerous place at 3 a.m., but it’s not so bad when you know where you’re going.

Still, this being New York and Culbreth being a woman, there’s one minor, if benign, problem. “I haven’t really gotten bothered, but I’ve gotten catcalls from drunks because I’m running when the bars are closing,” Culbreath says, laughing. Even if things did turn ugly, she’s pretty confident she’d escape unharmed. “I feel like I have a little bit of a kick in me.”

MIKE ARNSTEIN OWNS AN ecommerce business and trains by running from his house on the border of the Bronx and Westchester County down to work at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. He passes over the Henry Hudson Bridge, down the West Side, underneath the George Washington Bridge to Morningside Heights through Central Park and, finally, down Fifth Ave. “There’s a very small percentage that I’m actually in city streets,” he says. “It’s spectacular. It’s the greatest part of my lifestyle. I’ve traveled every which way to get around in the city, but on foot, through the park systems is unbelievable. And it’s made me an incredible ultrarunner, too.”

(Arnstein, it should be noted, is the kind of guy who answers the question “When is your next race?” with “Well, this weekend I’m either doing a 24-hour race in Oklahoma or 100-mile trail race in Arizona.”)

Every week or 10 days, Arnstein and a group of guy friends go for a long run. Sometimes, they traverse the , but frequently they will stay within the confines of the metropolitan area. Occasionally, they barely leave one neighborhood. “A month and a half ago we did an all-night run through the Financial District,” he says. “We went down every single street. We ran from nine at night until noon the next day. A 15-hour run. We just saw everything. Ground Zero. Everything. It was just killer. It was awesome.”

The culture of ultramarathoning is going strong in the country’s biggest city. Although it would be easier to be an elite-level ultrarunner in places like Santa Fe or the Pacific Northwest, there is space in the city to get out and go. Running is exercise, transportation, and urban exploration all wrapped into one. “Obviously, there are eight million people and there’s concrete and steel, but there are oases. You have to know where they are,” Innamorato says. You find them. You find a friend or 20. You set off running. It’s like anywhere else in the world. Maybe better.

Noah Davis () once trained for a marathon while living in Brooklyn. He got rather tired of running around Prospect Park.

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Signs posted around New York City make a simple request: “If you see something, say something.” The . If you happen upon a suspicious scene or activity, alert the authorities. It’s safety through crowdsourcing, NYPD-style.

It’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure it works. People are definitely seeing something, but they are not saying anything. They mostly just look at me strangely, mouth occasionally agape. And, I have to admit, it’s with good reason. See, it’s 9 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday in September. I’m running sub-eight-minute miles, wearing running shorts, an increasingly wet t-shirt, a broken backpack that’s cutting into my neck, and carrying two bricks in my arms. (Pro tip: If you ever find yourself needing to sort-of-sprint with bricks in hand, let your arms dangle down rather than curl up your biceps. It kills your form, but it’s way easier on your extremities.) I weave in and out of people wandering the streets of Brooklyn Heights. They have fancy umbrellas and fancier outerwear; I look like someone who is probably up to no good.

Why the broken-down, active-mason look? I bought the bricks—$1.63 for the pair, not bad—for a friend who needs them to prop up her air conditioner. Oh, and for the past three days, I’ve been running everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean everywhere. The bodega down the street. Meetings in midtown Manhattan. Harlem for dinner. (I will explain.) The plan is to go for a week straight. I want to see if I can do it, but I also want to know if running would actually make a viable option for getting around Gotham. Forget the commuters with their subways and the bikers with their fixies and their air of superiority; I want to jog. So, for seven days, I am.

A COUPLE CAVEATS: I work from home, so it’s not like I was commuting to an office every morning and evening. One day—Thursday—I didn’t even leave my apartment. (I was working the entire time, honest.) But I have to travel to meetings, and I ran at least a mile every other day: nearly 35 total. That’s not massive mileage, but it was enough to get a feel for the experiment. I could tell you all the things you’d learn running around New York for a week on your own—Fifth Avenue between 32nd and 38th is remarkably uphill; NYC is the last place in America the recession will hit because the well-dressed tourists in midtown constantly spend, spend, spend (and are oblivious to the location of their overstuffed, dangling shopping bags); a peanut-butter sandwich 45 minutes before a run is a colossal miscalculation—but this story is more about running as a means of transportation.

So, the question: Does running provide a viable substitute for the subway or a bike? Well, yes and no. There are definite advantages, but huge disadvantages, too. Mostly, they involve showing up everywhere dripping with sweat. New York is a hot, sticky place in the summer, but there’s a distinct difference between arriving at an office with a look that says, “It was 90 degrees on the subway platform, and I started perspiring a little,” and one that screams, “I just ran five miles, and my t-shirt is soaked through. I should’ve wrung it out. Sorry.” It’s also just a pain to explain to work acquaintances. And carrying stuff—bricks, extra clothes, keys, wallet, etc.—gets old pretty quickly.

Running does eliminate one of the most annoying x-factors about commuting in this city: timing. Namely, the variable amount of time it takes to get from place to place. The length of a subway journey fluctuates depending on a number of factors—construction, commuters blocking doors, time of day, train traffic—completely out of your control. Running? Less so. Add 30 seconds to your normal pace to account for waiting at traffic lights, multiply by the number of miles, and voila. You can actually plan an exact time of arrival.

For many trips—especially shorter ones—running is actually faster than taking the subway. I found the tipping point to be about five miles. (Of course, if you factor in the time it takes to stop sweating, you probably lose out. But still.) Frequently, it was dramatically faster to run. A friend and I left a bar at the same time Friday night. It was 1.7 miles away from my apartment. I made it home in 12 minutes. It took her 40. That was fun.

(Also nice: Running after two IPAs, which is just enough beer to encourage running fast and help mitigate any pain but not enough to slosh around uncomfortably in your stomach. Oh, and that time I learned you could get pints of ice cream delivered to your apartment. New York is an amazing city.)

On Saturday night, the last evening of my week-long quest, I attended a friend’s birthday dinner in Harlem, roughly nine miles from my Brooklyn apartment. (Note to self: Find friends who live closer.) I jogged over the Manhattan Bridge for the third time in seven days, took a right on Bowery and started the roughly 135-block journey northwest during . It was pouring when I ran through the mass of tourists in Times Square. They gave me strange looks, but no one said anything because you’re not supposed to talk to crazy people.

After arriving at the restaurant, I changed into jeans in the bathroom, ate a big Italian meal, and drank a couple glasses of wine. I would have run home, but by the time the check came it was close enough to midnight on the seventh day that I figured I’d done my duty. (I may have had something to do with that particular timing, but anyway.) We paid, left the restaurant, ambled to the 1 train, and rode back to Brooklyn. It took forever, but damn, it was easy.

Noah Davis () is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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