A New York-Induced Exercise
By RANDY KENNEDY (New York Times)
April 9, 2002

New York has bestowed names on many things over the years. There is the New York minute and the Bronx cheer, the Manhattan cocktail and the Waldorf salad. Even Mount Rushmore is named after a New York lawyer, Charles E. Rushmore, who owned mining property in the area.

With this in mind, there is a chance that a new fitness routine might be named for something that has been happening spontaneously at subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens over the last four months. Locally, it has become known as the G-train sprint.

The basic workout goes like this: Warm up by walking through a turnstile carrying your bag and a hot cup of deli coffee. When you hear a beeping sound that means a train is coming, start to jog toward the stairway.

Upon reaching the middle of the stairs and seeing that the train is much shorter than you thought it would be, bound down the stairs two at a time, exercising your vocal chords by making panic-like sounds. On the platform, break into a full sprint, dodging or ramming, if necessary, the people who are getting off the train and walking in the other direction.

This routine is intended to work most major muscle groups, develop cardiovascular strength and improve coordination. After enough practice, you should be able to jump into the end car of the shortened train just as the doors close on your bag, splashing only a little coffee on you. Do not be discouraged if you cannot do this on the first few tries.

Joan Dougherty, a paralegal, was not able to do it yesterday morning at the Greenpoint Avenue station, and she has been training there for months. "The guy saw me!" she said of the conductor, as a train pulled out and he watched with a bored expression as her sprint faded to a jog.

Peter Jou, a computer programmer, did not try at all. From the top of the stairs, he saw the train, paused and then walked calmly and evenly down as it pulled away. "I'm always afraid I'm going to fall down the stairs," he explained.

The situation that has given rise to the G-train sprint is part of a series of Solomonic bargains, the kind that New York City Transit must make when it tries to change anything within the rigid logic of the subway.

In order to reduce crushing crowding in Queens, it added the V train along Queens Boulevard, where the E, F, R and G already ran. But that meant too many trains for too few tracks, so one train had to go, and it ended up being the G, which had its route cut almost in half. Of course, an uproar ensued among its riders. And so a concession was made: the train would continue to run its full route weekends and nights, and it would also run more frequently, particularly during busy times.

Except there was another problem. To run more frequently, the G needed more trains, but there were not enough on hand. So the solution was to cut the trains from six cars to four, sticking all the leftover cars together to make extra trains. While on paper this means more trains, it sometimes seems to riders that it means only more of them packed into smaller trains.

And, more importantly for explaining the G-train sprint, it means that on a platform designed to be filled by an eight-car, 600-foot train, the ones that show up now are only 300 feet long. Back in December, when the change was first made, paper signs were posted on platform columns to let riders know where these truncated trains would stop. But the signs are gone now and for people unfamiliar with the line, the wind sprints have begun.

"I was at Bergen Street one day, and it looked like the burning of Atlanta in `Gone With the Wind,' " said Gene Russianoff, a lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign who lives along the G line in Brooklyn. "There were all these people flooding down the platform in waves."

Patti Choi, a member of the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, has been riding the G train so long she remembers when it was called the GG. She looked imploringly at a conductor yesterday as a few of the weaker runners barely managed to make his train at the Greenpoint Avenue station. The conductor shrugged as the train pulled away. "I waited for them, right?" he said. "You saw me waiting."

Eddy Rodriguez and John Marshall were the ones who barely made it. Before the train came, they were chewing the fat on a bench that was a relic of a more genteel past. The trains don't stop there anymore.

"You write down this: `We want our train back,' " said Mr. Rodriguez, wearing a jacket with the word "Bulldog" in capital letters on the back and running down the platform with a cup of coffee and a bad limp. "Did you write that down?"