Last Sept. 11th, do you remember your run?

42 min 10k out and back in busse woods elk grove. did not see a soul. usually dozens of ohare planes at midday, with flightpath over park. oddly peaceful. it stayed that way for 4-5 days until planes started again.

our team still had organized practice.. we did a 2 mile warmup ran down to the yale fields. then 6X1 mile 5:10 average with 2 minute rest/recovery then 2 mile cooldown

Nope..i don't remember doing anything else other than being glued to tv and calling up friends and family whom I had not spoken to in years....

Didn't get to run last September 11th due to being in the Army stationed in Germany. We immediately went on full alert, and for 2 weeks I was completely unable to run, all I did was guard duty and sleep....more guard duty then sleeping though!

I went out in the evening, jogged for two or three miles on the trail, and stopped. I was thinking about someone I knew who, I had just learned, had been on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

There weren't many people outside. I remember passing one woman who was sitting at the side of the trail, crying. Another woman, walking along the trail, was also in tears.

...an easy 5 in the evening, and I felt guilty about it.

I remember thinking how many folks wouldn't be going home that night, lacing up, and heading out for an easy few.

I was in Los Angeles on a business trip - I had just flown in from London a couple of days earlier, and I was due to attend a conference that morning. I woke at about 6:00am, and flipped on CNN to find the first tower burning.

I went for a run about 20 minutes later, not realising the second tower had been hit until I came back. I was staying in Santa Monica, and ran along the long boardwalk to Venice beach and back - very eerie. I could see homeless men listening to their radios, hearing the news presenters trying to put together the bits and pieces of information that were drifting in.

I guess I didn't appreciate the scale of the attacks until I came back from my run, and the towers had collapsed and the full extent of atrocity became apparent.

I was stranded in LA for another 10 days or so, until I could get a flight out of San Fran. I can tell you this: I've never hugged my wife as hard as I did when I finally got back to London.

Being in America during those few days made the images of 9/11 much more visceral than they would have been for me had I been back home. Watching people queue up to buy American flags was perhaps the most powerful one: I felt both sorry for you - in that it seemed such a feeble response to had to be tremendous anger, and yet I had to admire the strength of the genuine patriotism and unity people were trying to demonstrate.

It was a very surreal week...and I can't imagine I'll ever forget it.

Martin

We got out of school early... I remember being somewhat nervous since my school is less than a mile from the Washington DC border. I got home and just threw my books down and put on my running clothes. I felt so numb from everything, I just wanted to be able to feel pain I knew so many around me were feeling.

Went on a run that was at least 15 miles and over two hours. Still the longest run by time I've ever done, and I don't ever think I've been in so much pain. It was the most necessary run I've ever done. I refused to run the loop I ran for months after that, it was just too hard.

After being glued to the TV like everyone else and trying to make some semblance of sense of it all, and to call loved ones and friends, I went on an 11-mile run over Poorman Road with Michael Sandrock--he's 43, I'm 40 this month. We are both sort of over the hill, so we started off easy, sort of talking about this along the lines like, 'Can you really believe this shit happened??'

But we both realized we needed to get our minds off of it and before long we were running fast enopugh that conversation was becoming a little more difficult. Soon the old competitive instinct kicked in and it became the fastest run, in race or training (I haven't really racesd in several years, he jumps in for fun), we had run all year. We really hammered it and must have been pushing 190 for HR.

We innately recognized at that moment in time, as runners, that running out the hurt and anguish of things beyond our control, and replacing it with a more familiar pain was the only immediate way we could get our minds off the pain of others, even if only for a moment. And when we got done with our run, we both felt better for a short time, gave eachother a sweaty shoulder pat, tapped knuckles, said to the effect of 'THAT was a good one---so I'll C-ya L8r brada', and that was it. What else was there to say? We both knew that whole event would creep, uninvited, back into our collective psyches within a few moments and stay with us forever, as is the case with the majority of us.

Just goes to show, all you can do is try to fulfill your life's promise, recognize it for the gift it is, and go on living.

No run that day, in fact in my training log it says "No run BAD DAY". In fact I only got in 2 runs on the 12th-15th of Sep. I remember my run on the 12th was filled with a lot of guilt feelings. Being in the Army my next couple of weeks were filled with 12-18 hour work days/nights. Lots of tired training runs. Still feel guilty thinking about getting bummed out that my running was "suffering"

That morning we had our physical fitness test 1.5 mile run at my military school. I half-assed it as usual, being able to make the "perfect" score with minimal effort. I remember working in the physics lab making electrical circuits later that morning. My professor walked in about halfway through and blurted out, "I am so sorry, something terrible has happened." The day went downhill from there...classes were cancelled and we were not allowed to leave our dorms for the next few days without explicit permission (not running), so I didn't run for the next two days. That weekend, I went up to Philadelphia for the Distance Run. I cannot remember a more important race experience in my life. I broke my 10k PR en route to my first half marathon finish, unable to think about anything but how I could show respect for those who died by embracing my life to the fullest. The atmosphere was just incredible; anyone who was there will tell you that. Some people said that we were selfish for wanting to race in spite of what had happened. I say that I felt I HAD to race that day BECAUSE of what had happened.

-Matt

Of course I do. I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a predominently muslim country. I had just arrived the previous day, in KL to cheer for my Lao friends at the SoutheastAsiaGames.

I ran about 20km on the treadmill at a hotel, then went to a net cafe, and I get a frantic Instant Message from my friend Joe in NYC that a plane had hit the WTC. I assumed that it was a Cessna or something....

I knew that something was VERY WRONG because I could not access any news sites such as cnn.com, usatoday.com, nbcnews.com, etc.

So I RAN back to my hotel and turned on CNN and I was aghast.

Jason

After I got home from work I ran my usual workout but on very shaky legs.

I'm on the West coast (Az), so the towers were attacked while my team was out for morning practice. I remember feeling good because I'd had a great workout. It wasn't until after I'd gotten in my car and the radio came on that I became aware that something terrible had happened. The news was very sketchy at that point, so it took about 20 minutes for the announcer to say that planes were falling out of the sky and the towers had crumbled. Needless to say the good feelings from the workout had become rather insignificant by then...

Had started my first college X-C coaching job 3 weeks earlier. Was off campus until mid afternoon, oblivious of the horrible events until around noon. We were scheduled to do a track workout off campus that we had to drive to. When I went to pick up the school van they told me all school activities had been cancelled, but they gave me a van anyway. I was surprised that everyone showed up at 3:45 ready to go. Had planned on giving them the option of not running, but the captains came to me right away and said they felt we should stick to what we had planned on for the day. They felt that if we could get away from campus for awhile and do some hard running it would have value for everyone. We did 6 x 1k with 400 recovery, with 10 minutes warmup/cooldown on trails in the woods. It was a quiet, determined workout. The main thing is, we were there for each other.

Took over three hours to walk home from work down on Wall, laced 'em up and hit Central Park in a daze and a state of mind no doubt lacking full comprehension of what just happened three blocks from my desk.

Began heading north around the reservoir, curled around, looked south and was stopped dead in my tracks by both what I saw and the cluster of runners frozen by the surreal landscape laid out beyond the reservoir's calm waters.......Midtown's towering skyline in the foreground with an enormous plume of smoke and ash reaching upwards behind it.

As the wind seemed to shift on my return home I caught "the smell" and with it, the reality of that day.

Worst run of my life.

I ran early in the day, an 8 miler and upon returning home my neighbor told me what had happened. I spent the rest of the day either watching TV, or thinking. I'm a musician and that evening I was supposed to be involved in the recording of an improvisational album, for which the studio costs had already been paid. My band and I went in and recorded the most haunting record I've ever heard. To this day I cannot listen to it.

Peace,

Monty

We had a morning tempo run (around 6am CST), and went to the ice baths as usual after practice. All the trainers and athletes in the training room were crowded around the TVs watching the footage of an airplane striking the second of the 2 trade center towers. I didn't have class until 12:30, and I remember going home afterwards gluing myself to the TV watching the Pentagon being hit next, followed by footage of the trade center towers finally collapsing to the ground.

We had afternoon practice cancelled that day and were given the option to run on our own. I did some easy mileage, but felt almost guilty about it... the streets around where I ran were eerily deserted.

I ran 12 miles in San Francisco after work, much of it on a trail overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. All the overlooks were packed with camcorder vultures who had their tripods set up and were waiting to get a 747 hitting the bridge on tape.

I think I averaged about 5:45 pace. Definitely needed to exercize some demons on that run.