Race Report: ING New York City Marathon

Really, it was like all the other NYC Marathons before it. No rain (it hasn’t rained during the race since ’97), no major glitches, an overwhelming number of runners from abroad (over half of them), two million spectators. And Paula Radcliffe making it look way too easy.


I was assigned to a 5AM bus to the start on Staten Island. As usual, several thousand runners meet at the New York Public Library in midtown to catch one of the dozens and dozens of buses making the trip. This year, they decided to assign a specific bus time to each runner to avoid the problems of the past, such as late runners showing up at 7AM when the cut-off is 6:30, causing delays. Like Boston, they make you get out there hours in advance and wait and wait and wait for a 10AM start. I’m used to it, but it gets earlier and earlier each year, and you end up waiting outside for at least three or four hours.

And this year it was worse. Saturday night, it was almost 70 degrees outside; the weather forecasters predicted it would turn colder overnight, and they were right. The temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees in six hours, so when I was making it out the door at 4:45, the temperature in midtown was 40 degrees. Which is OK running weather, but what I didn’t realize was that there were bone-chilling gusts of wind out there, and Staten Island was right then at about 37 degrees with even worse wind chills.

So of course, the bus ride is fast, and it just about set a record getting there. I arrived by 6AM, and with 3 hours and 40 minutes to go before the start of the race I had nothing to do but hit port-a-johns and stop myself from nervously drinking too much water, or worse, coffee. It was FREEZING, and I had two singlets, two long sleeve cotton shirts, a running jacket, and two pairs of long running pants on. Around 7AM, I lost the feeling in my toes and heard my teeth chatter, that’s how bad it was. When the sun came out, it got a little better, but we were all (and I can speak for 40,000 runners) ready to get on the road.

I bumped into friends, chatted and threw out pre-race good wishes without being some cheery asshole. Met up with running pal Susie, and we spent about an hour and a half commenting on this year’s marathon model. Soon, we were off to the foot of the Verrazano Bridge where we stood for about a half hour before the starting gun went off, longer than usual.

I was on the bottom level of the bridge (they always just show the top level on TV coverage, try to imagine thousands of runners one floor below that, too). And once we got there, the icy wind gusts were brutal. I was wearing a hat, and had to take it off for fear of losing it off the side, because the wind was just that bad. You just wanted to get the hell over the bridge and get out of there, especially after spending hours shivering in the cold. I think a lot of people started out too fast just because of this, but I think everybody starts out too fast here because they just want to get the damn thing done.

So we make it across the bridge into Brooklyn, and guess what, nature calls. So I jumped over a three-foot concrete barrier and joined the official-looking firing squad of gentlemen who had the same idea. I lost exactly one minute in time, but at least the good news was that nature would not be placing any more calls or leaving voice mails again during the race.

Speaking of, you’d be right to ask how I was planning to approach this race. Racing for a PR? Running for a reasonable, easy time? Sightseeing? Well, it was a little of all that, but I had gotten it in my head that I wouldn’t mind trying to run this particular course a little faster than normal, and close to my faster finish times, around 3:20. So my plan was to run the first 10 miles at about a 7:50 minute/mile pace, the second ten at 7:30, and the final 6.2 at a little slower than that, perhaps 7:40 if possible. Since they had chip mats and markers at all the 5K splits, I had figured out my goal times at each 5K split, in advance.

And I have to say, I hit the first 5K split about ten seconds behind schedule, and that included the unplanned, outdoor bathroom break. And then at the 10K mark, I hit that 20 seconds too soon, and so I knew to slow it down. And the 15K and 20K times were good, too, and by then I was picking up the pace and passing some of the other runners. I’d never paid much attention to kilometer markers in a marathon before, but it takes some of the pressure off when you don’t obsess about each and every mile marker. Plus the math skills that are needed to compute all the mile-based arithmetic… well, you know what I mean. If you’re running an 8 minute/mile, that’s a 5 minute/kilometer, and knowing that a 5K chunk at that pace equals 25 minutes makes it a little easier to wrap your head around, in my opinion.

So the crowds were wild, the course was jammed, the weather chilly, and the sticky Gatorade flowing. I felt reasonably good, and was still OK at mile 15 before arriving in Manhattan. Things were uneventful, despite ‘Runner Mark’, who wore his name, and thus generated seventy increasingly annoying ‘Go Mark!’ spectator yells-per-minute (I actually counted and timed them while running one stretch in Brooklyn, I stopped at a water station to let him get ahead, and away from me). I didn’t even get pushed or run over by the French or Italian running tour groups in matching outfits, as is usually the case. I kid the French and Italians! Gotta love them knocking people over at water stations, they’re just kooky kids from across the pond.

Once I got onto Third Avenue and the rumblings of the death march, I knew I only had about nine miles to go. And that’s when the fatigue begins to set in and then the self-doubt and then the desire to find and push that little red button on a nuclear warhead. But the 5K splits call, and I’m only a minute off of the schedule. I thought to myself, OK, this isn’t so bad, last year my quads were turning to granite right about now, like they’d seen Medusa screaming ‘Go Mark!’ at Mile 19.

And you know what happened then, it got harder. By the time I got to the one-mile hill on FFA (Fucking Fifth Avenue), I was getting pretty much over it. And my pace suffered, I knew I was running about 30 seconds per mile slower. I did the completely thinkable, and stopped to walk for 20 seconds. ‘This is stupid, and it hurts’, a quote from somebody, I can’t imagine who, came to mind. But I restarted and got myself into goddamn Central Park, where the course always enters around mile 23.5.

People I actually know started to pass me. Why can’t these people pass me earlier in the race when I’m not so pissed off? Yeah, I know, I’ve probably done it too, but really, you’d think out of 40,000 runners I’d get a break and just be surrounded by the Run Latvia Team.

SO. I kept going, and then felt much better after a little 20 second walk AT MILE 25.5. That’s right, I always point and laugh at people who can’t suck it up and finish the last half mile, but believe me, if you’ve been there, you know. Off I went again, slightly refreshed, and I realize I’d blown the 5K split schedule by several minutes, no special finish time for me today, it’s more P than PR.

But if I can make it to the finish line by 3:30, well, that will be just fine. So I practically sprinted the last 400 meters and… made it. The clock said 3:30:10, but the watch said 3:29:18. Stupid clock.

Amazingly, I felt OK after crossing the finish line and the 25-minute walk to my baggage truck. I bumped into an acquaintance who had finished right before me and had missed his PR too, and then more friends later, who finished with the same time as I did. And I realized (here comes the annoying half-glass full part of our story) that it was my fastest NYC Marathon time, and that I had qualified for Boston again. Now I feel like I almost have to run Boston next time; after many years of not qualifying, it’s starting to feel like an obligation out of respect for all the younger guys who can’t get in because of some insanely fast qualifying time. I’ve been there, and good luck shaving twenty or thirty minutes off of your fastest marathon time just to be allowed to run east into Boston in mid-April. Whatever, I’ll decide soon if Cranky Will Represent.

So today, Monday, I ran a nice five-miles and felt progressively better as I went along, and then hit the gym. On the way back, a runner wearing her marathon finisher’s medal saw me on the street, and I stopped to congratulate her. And she knew by the way I was dressed that I had finished, too, and told me in a nice way that it pissed her off that I wasn’t even limping.

My work was done.


Next up: another dumb race in two weeks.
May I have another, SIR!