Hot tea at the ready in Century Park for our pleasure upon finishing a long run in 80% humidity and about 85 degrees. 

Haven’t seen that in Central Park, nor Van Cortlandt. 

It was great, though. Actually, at the 10k point of my run, I mixed tea with lemon lime Gatorade. It was quite good. The tea diluted Gatorade’s sugar. 

Raw tempeh–high protein fermented soybeans–out for us post-run. I love tempeh and it’s perfect post-long run. But…

Never seen that either. 

Wonderful crispy, sugary ginger roll-up dessert-type treat after run!

Better than Olympic-style aid table we pass by after every 5k loop at Century. Other teams have nice set-ups, too, but ours seems to have the most food, in addition to fluids. 

Some teams even have aid stations set up for track workouts! This was at Jiao Tong University on Saturday:

Chinese runners seem really excited to create & join specific teams. It seems commonplace for teammates to wear their “flag” during runs, be they track workouts or long days. 

Typically, in the U.S. we only wear team uniforms/singlets on race days. 

We wear plenty of other team attire in the meantime, but Chinese runners seem to want to fly their flag on every run–or at least those in large public squares such as Century & Jiao Tong. 

Man in glasses on right cracked me up. For a good 30 minutes or more he was explaining something at length to this small group around him–only 7-8 folks at times. All the while he wore a headset with microphone. His voice ranged out loudly, as folks listened intently from no more than ten feet away. 

American coaches-mentors: Please grab your mics.

Lastly for now, there’s also a Vegan Runners team with 450 members!