Sometimes getting the word out about one's writings feels a bit like a marathon.  I've been giving talks or interviews almost every week. 

On Thursday, my task was particularly daunting.  I needed to drive to Manhattan around midnight, go to a radio studio near Wall Street, and be interviewed on the Joey Reynolds Talk Show. 

It was my first time actually driving to and trying to park in Manhattan.  Normally, I would take the train, but, given that it would be the wee hours of the night, I was worried about missing the last low-price train back to Philadelphia and having to take a much more expensive train or even having to spend the night in the train station.  So, I drove.

The streets in Lower Manhattan didn't seem set up for parking.  During the day, I'm sure almost everyone parks in a garage.  So there were no clearly marked places on the streets to park.  I drove down Broadway, until it almost ended, and found a side street with a few cars parked there.  I looked around carefully to see if there were any no parking signs and didn't find any.  So I parked.

I was a bit early, so took a stroll to the very tip on Manhattan and got a great view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island right across the harbor.  I also walked down Wall Street and saw the Stock Exchange building-much smaller than what I expected.

Finally I headed to the studio.  There I met the second interviewee, who was dressed in a kind of running suit, and wearing gloves on his feet instead of shoes.  Turned out to be a writer who has just published a book about a Mexican tribe of super-runners.  He learned from them how to run up to 50 miles at a stretch and feel refreshed.  The key, he mentioned, was not to wear running shoes, but just to go barefoot or to wear a kind of gloves for the feet that feel like barefoot.  Interesting.

We were then invited to the kitchen of the studio for a midnight calamari (squid) dinner.  Felt a bit surreal.

Originally, the running writer and I were supposed to be interviewed separately, presumably because our topics were so different.  But then the host decided to group us together and interview both at once.

The host was very friendly and chatty.  He has a long history of interviewing rock stars, dating back to the early 1960s.  His style of interviewing is very different from what I have ever experienced--stream of conscious and connected to whatever happens to be in the news.  So we were chatting about New York City, the Yankees, Afghanistan, etc, with each of us trying to say a bit about our books.  I tried to think of as many ways as I could to relate physics to running, and connect up my topic with the co-interviewee.  I pointed out that Einstein imagined trying to run and catch up to a light wave.

After the interview I walked back to my car at 1:00 am and was relieved it was still there. I was looking forward to heading home and getting some sleep, since I had to teach the next day.  But first I had to cross the Holland Tunnel out of NYC, which had the worse traffic jam I had ever been in.  Something like four wide avenues, with four lanes of traffic each, had to converge into a single lane to pass into the tunnel.  Imagine hundreds and hundreds of honking cars, full of tired, frustrated drivers, all trying to muscle their way into a small, single-lane, tunnel entrance!  It literally took an hour just to travel about 1/4 mile and reach the long-sought exit from NYC!  I finally made it home by 4:30 am, only to have to wake up at 6:30 am for work.

Anyway, it was not an actual marathon (the famous New York Marathon is taking place as I write these words), but exhausted nonetheless.