I finished!! I ran the ING NYC Marathon in 6:11:00! 26.2 miles in six hours and eleven minutes! And mostly, I had the time of my life! Where should I begin? Not at the starting line, because the experience began even before I crossed the start pad and officially started my race. It’s been a 4 ½ month long journey filled with countless experiences, but you already know that, so I’ll start with race week.
The week leading up to the race was gorgeous, every day was a classic Autumn day – cerulean skies, leaves turning colors, temps in the high 50s/low 60s, the distant sounds of honking migrating geese. Autumn is my favorite running season, it’s hard to not run when nature is screaming at you to come outside and play, enticing you with brilliant colors and a hint of warmth in the air.
(Click on any picture to enlarge.)
The picture does not capture the extraordinary beauty of this day.
But the week before race day was not the time to ignore my training schedule and add extra miles just because the weather was making me euphoric, so I kept the miles short. My last run before race day was Friday – an easy 2 miles. Saturday morning I woke up feeling like a child on Christmas Eve, excited about what the next day would bring. I even had a gift! A friend had left an envelope on my car with a card, two charms (lucky charms!) and a donation. It was my second pre-race gift that week. On Thursday, a friend had dropped off a care package: Gatorade, pasta and a card. (She had already made an online donation.) By the time we left for NYC at 11am, my inbox and facebook wall were filled with quite a few messages of encouragement and support. I was on cloud nine!
Pre-race gift #1
Pre-race gift #2
Rachel drove for the first hour to NYC - no license yet (thank goodness!), still driving on a learner's permit.
Almost in Manhattan!
We arrived in NYC around 3pm and went straight to the expo so I could pick up my bib and Rachel could go shopping. She loves race expos for the shopping and she scored some pretty cool stuff at the NYCM expo. As we left the bib pick-up area and walked into the expo shopping area, Rachel asked me if I was excited about the marathon. She was a few steps ahead of me, so when I didn’t answer right away, she didn’t even need to look at me to know why. As she started to turn around she said, “Oh my God, are you crying?!” which made me laugh. Okay, I wasn’t sobbing and causing a scene, but I was having a verklempt moment. I had my bib and I was less than 24 hours away from running in the NYC Marathon. The last time I remember being that excited about something was 16 years ago when Rachel was born.
We spent about an hour at the expo, 15 minutes of that time I spent at the Garmin booth where a very patient and kind Garmin rep set my watch for 4 min. run, 1 min. walk intervals for the first half of the race and then 3 min. run, 1 min. walk for the second half. I love my Garmin, it’s like having a small computer on my wrist, but since I tend to be technologically challenged, I’m not using the watch to its full potential. I spent an entire night just trying to figure out how to set it for intervals, so I was very appreciative to have someone set it up for me.
Around 5pm, we checked into The Roosevelt Hotel which was a bit disappointing. The lobby sort of lived up to its “Mad Men” glamour, but the room didn’t. Since “Mad Men” is mostly shot in Los Angeles, maybe The Roosevelt Hotel interior scenes are actually a hotel in Los Angeles or a set created by a construction crew and Production/Set Designer!
Our seating time for the pre-race carbo load dinner was 7:15, so David and I had a little time to meet George, one of his college friends, in the bar, while Rachel did a little speed shopping….yes, more shopping. She’s a teenage girl! And yes, she went out by herself. It wasn't quite dark, Urban Outfitters was only a couple streets away (5th Ave. @ 43rd St., we were at 45th St. & Madison Ave.) and she pride's herself in being fairly city savvy for a small town girl. And yes, I had a drink….just one. It was early in the evening, plenty of time for me to consume enough water before bedtime to make the drink insignificant.
This is one of those pictures that makes one say, "Do I really look like that?"
The carbo load dinner was pretty basic: lots of pasta, salad, bread, and a (I think?) bulgur dish. Two dj’s spun tunes and videos of last year’s race ran on big screens throughout the tented dining room which was set up outside of Tavern on the Green. And to no one’s surprise, the video made me teary eyed.
Random runners and their family & friends at the pre-race dinner.
As a child on Christmas Eve, I could sleep soundly through the night, not the case for Marathon Eve - I slept terribly. At 3am I heard what sounded like shouting, specifically protesters shouting. At the hotel bar, earlier that evening, a woman claimed the Occupy Wall Street protesters were planning to occupy the marathon. It seemed like a ludicrous idea since 99.9% of marathon runners are the 99% so why would they want to disrupt an event that really has nothing to do with the 1%. The woman who relayed this info might have been one of the 1%. But since that seed had been planted into my occasionally paranoid brain, what I heard on the street below our hotel room was protesters. But when I got up to look out the window, all I saw were cabs in the street and a few people walking, nothing else. Frank was right....the city never sleeps. So was the shouting just a dream? I went back to bed and tried to calm my brain. At 5:30am I woke myself up with a sobbing gasp caused by a nightmare that I’d missed the start of the race because I had overslept. The dream was very real and disturbing. I remember crying and yelling at someone who was making light of the situation, who didn’t understand how much the race meant to me. When I saw that it was 5:30am, the drama and emotion of the dream was washed away by relief and I started to smile. The day was finally here – race day! The ING NYC Marathon!! YAY!!!!
It took me almost an hour to get ready; although I had prepared the food part of my fuel belt the night before: a few pretzels, one energy waffle, three energy chews and Arnica pills. Saturday morning I noticed that my left foot/ankle didn’t feel normal, no pain, just some discomfort. I’d also brought Arnica gel, which I slathered on my foot after putting on sunscreen. My last race morning task was to fill my water bottles. With the start of fall, I switched from pureed watermelon to a very diluted chia seed drink. Chia seeds are the ideal food for long distance runners: very hydrating, provides energy and nutrition. The key is to dilute the drink enough so you still get the benefits from the chia seeds without gagging because the water is a little chewy, somewhat similar to drinking fish roe!
I left David and Rachel asleep in the hotel room, stopped at the bar to get hot water for my tea and hailed a cab to the Whitehall Terminal in lower Manhattan to catch the Staten Island Ferry. I was the cabbie’s first fare for the day. He didn’t even know the marathon was that day! The streets of mid-town and lower Manhattan were mostly empty. It was very surreal. I’d never been up that early in NYC. It was no more than a 15 min. cab ride – another first for me: the fastest cab ride ever from mid-town to lower Manhattan! As we neared the terminal, traffic increased as did the number of people on the street, specifically, runners! They were everywhere - walking to the terminal or running back and forth on the street to warm-up. While I waited for the ferry, I ate a banana and drank my tea and people watched and eavesdropped on conversations. The vibe in the terminal was almost tangible. Excitement was radiating off of everyone, including the handful of non-runners. Depending on the ferry, 3,500 to 6,000 passengers can be transported between Manhattan and Staten Island. And the next time someone says, “Nothing in life is free.”, you can say that’s not true because the Staten Island Ferry is free – all the time!
Getting on the ferry
Once we boarded, I moved to the small space at the bow of the ferry so I could stand outside. It was a little chilly but there were plenty of bodies to keep me somewhat warm. Many of those bodies were a team of runners from France (their shirts said something about Bordeaux) and a French television crew. As we passed the Statue of Liberty, my eyes filled with tears for the third or fourth or hundredth time in the past 24 hrs. It didn’t matter that I was on a ferry filled with a mob of people, standing outside on the small, crowded bow of the ferry; at that moment, it was just me and the Statue of Liberty and Barbra Streisand singing, “Nobody is gonna rain on my parade!”
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
Once we arrived on Staten Island, I immediately got in line to use the bathroom in the terminal. It was the last time I’d have the opportunity to use a real bathroom for a very long time; and I had plenty of time (about 2 hrs.) before my start time. The bus ride to the start villages was much longer than I expected and I should have used that time wisely and took a power nap, but I didn’t . Mostly I spent the time texting my friend, Jeannie, who lives in California but was visiting a friend in NYC so I was hoping to see her somewhere on the course. Jeannie ran NYC back in the day when it was still a “small” race – less than 25,000 runners. In 1978, when Grete Waitz ran the marathon in 2:32:30, setting a new women’s marathon world record, 9,875 runners participated in the marathon. Ten years later, Grete Waitz ran her ninth, and last, NYC Marathon in 2:28:07 and 23,463 runners started the race. This year, I was one of 47,438 runners who lined up at the start for the NYC Marathon!
Manhattan from Staten Island
By the time my bus arrived at the start villages I had about an hour before it was time to line up in my corral, plenty of time to get in line (again) for the port-a-potty. One of the top five rules for running a marathon is to use the port-a-potty as often as you can before the race starts. Is that t.m.i.? The corral area was quite festive with live music playing, helicopters flying above and lots of announcements. At 9:40am I was below the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge when the starting gun went off, so I saw the first wave of runners run across the bridge. The professional women started at 9:10am, so I had missed seeing them, but the professional men were in Wave 1. All of us mere mortal runners cheered, hollered and clapped as we looked upwards toward the bridge, watching their heads bob, like bobble-head running gods. And yes, it was another verklempt moment for me.
At 9:55 the announcements began for the Wave 3 runners to go to their corrals. Wave 2 runners were already corralled waiting for their start. My corral was 65, the second to the last corral. Once again, I just stood among my fellow runners, taking in the sights and sounds. Did I mention it was an absolutely gorgeous morning – clear skies, sunny, cool but not cold. Standing there, waiting, seemed like a good photo op, so I asked a woman next to me if she could please take my picture. She smiled and pointed at the shutter button, implying, “Press here.” Leave it to me to ask someone who didn’t speak English to take my picture. Afterwards, I noticed she was with a group wearing “Italia” shirts. There were quite a few runners from other countries. Italy had the largest contingency with 3,284 runners and France was second with 3,089. For most of the race, many of the runners that ran close to my pace and were with me for a majority of the race, were wearing “Italia” shirts, except for one guy who was dressed like a Roman gladiator, but his girlfriend had on an “Italia” shirt.
My fellow runners in corral 65; the dudes in red are from Italy.
At 10:10 the gun went off and the second wave of runners took off across the bridge and again we cheered, hollered and clapped. At 10:15 they opened the corral shoots and moved us into the next staging area where there was a bank of port-a-potties, so guess what I did?! By 10:30 we slowly started to move towards the bridge. Back on the performance stage, a singer from the Bronx, or maybe it was Queens, sang “New York, New York.” Then the announcer counted down, the gun went off, we all cheered and Frank Sinatra started singing, “New York, New York”, and I cried and smiled and began my 26.2 mile journey through the five boroughs of New York City! It was truly one of my most exhilarating moments ever!
Somehow I missed mile #1, which was on the bridge, and when I looked at my watch at mile #2, my watch read 1.46 miles. It was confusing since I started my watch when I crossed the start pad; but it didn’t matter, so what if I didn’t have my split times for every mile. I’d still be able to see my splits for every 5k on the results page.
Within the first 5-6 miles in Brooklyn I came upon a young Korean man who had one arm and no legs; he was running on metal prosthetics. He wore a sign that said something about Korean Amputees. I slowed down as I approached him so I could say, “You go, dude! Have a great run!” He smiled back at me and said, “Thanks.” I have no idea if he finished and if he quit right after I saw him, he’d still be my hero!
Brooklyn - I loved Brooklyn! I want to live in Brooklyn! The neighborboods of Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights were especially appealing – so charming and the spectators were wonderful. Most of the 26.2 mile course was lined with spectators and I tapped into their energy often. And several times I laughed out loud because of specatator signs: “I’m just trying to cross the street.” “I got up early too, so I could make this sign.” The bridges, however, were without spectators, and so was Borough Park – the Brooklyn Hasidic community. The scene was almost surreal: one moment I was running through streets lined with cheering crowds, and then it was quiet, not a single spectator, just people going about their business, barely glancing at the runners. The runners must have seemed like an alien invasion in their quaint and reserved community.
At about mile 10 or 11, I asked a spectator if I was still in Brooklyn since I didn’t recall seeing a sign for Queens or hearing any spectators say, “Welcome to Queens”. Brooklyn went on forever, specifically 13 miles. Brooklyn was half of the course!
Brooklyn!
Just after mile 13, I crossed the Pulaski Bridge into Queens. Honestly, I don’t remember anything about Queens, and the last picture I took was on the bridge. I was there to run, not take pictures. Maybe the reason I don’t remember Queens was because I was only there for 2 miles.
Half-way there! The Pulaski Bridge looking towards Manhattan
I wasn’t feeling as good as I should have at the half-way mark. The hilly course was taking its toll on me. Just past mile 16, I crossed the Queensboro Bridge, which had a pretty serious incline. It seemed like an opportune time for a walk break, even though my watch didn’t alert me to walk. I also decided to check my phone for the first time. I had several text messages, all telling me how well I was doing - friends had been tracking me via their computers and phones. A text from Mary (Jake’s mom) said I was “kicking butt”, so I called her to say, “Not anymore, now my butt is getting kicked.” Around the time my wave was being corralled, Mary was starting the Two Cities Half Marathon in Fresno where her oldest son, Matt, lives. By the time I spoke to her, she was finished. She gave me a great pep talk which helped peel me off the mental wall, the first of what became more walls than I’m use to. My energy level was fairly good. I wasn’t feeling depleted. It was my head that was messing me up. Being mentally strong is as important as being physically prepared for long distance running. Maybe the medical tents should include a sports psychologist for quick pep talks.
The best part of the Queensboro Bridge was that it took me into Manhattan – Harlem and the Upper East Side - although those 3 ½ miles were also a bit of blur, except for when I saw David and Rachel. I had called Rachel when, yet again, the wall loomed up in front of me. She told me where they were standing so I could look for them. I really needed to see some familiar smiling, waving and cheering faces at that point. The wall was easier to get over after seeing them, although the thought crossed my mind to run over to them and say, “Okay, I’m done, let’s go get something to eat.” As I ran up First Avenue, I vaguely remember thinking: “How is it that with all my countless visits to Manhattan, none of this looks familiar?” And the only time I’ve spent in Harlem has been when I’ve run the full loop in Central Park, which hasn’t been often. At about mile 19 ½, I crossed the fourth of the five bridges, the Willis Avenue Bridge, which took me into the Bronx (or is The Bronx?). I couldn’t tell you anything about the Bronx. It left absolutely no impression on me, but at that point I was back on the wall and ready to take a sledgehammer to it…..or to one of the loud, headbanging punk rock bands that was on the course. There were one too many of those awful bands and not enough high school bands playing the “Rocky” theme or some other quintessential running songs. (Damn, that video makes me almost want to sign up for the Philadelphia Marathon!) I kept wondering if anyone auditioned these bands or did the NY Road Runners just put out a notice for bands to go ahead and set up wherever they wanted to on the course. Because of the screeching guitars and screaming singers, I missed quite a few of the alerts from my watch but by the time I reached the Bronx, I was just doing whatever my body needed.
About 20 min. after entering the Bronx, I was leaving the Bronx via the last of the bridges, the Madison Avenue Bridge, which took me back into Manhattan. There was a man standing at the entrance to the bridge. I remember thinking that he reminded me a little of my godfather. As I passed him, he said, “Welcome to Manhattan, and you need to relax your shoulders, you look tense.” I said “Thank you, all those horrible bands are stressing me out!” At that point, I was getting a little nutty. As I entered Manhattan for the second time, a woman was holding a sign that said, “That was your last bridge.” Yay. Now where was the sign that said, “That was your last band!” Obviously I had become obsessed about the bands.
So I was back in Harlem where music was blaring out of storefronts – some of it good, most of it just adding to my stress – and a dance group was putting on a great show for the runners and spectators. I thought about how different this Harlem was from the Harlem Renaissance period and wondered how Langston Hughes would have viewed the marathon and 21st century Harlem. His poem, “Harlem”, describes a place somewhat similar to the Harlem that I ran through yet still a bit different from the Harlem I was introduced to by the Hughes character, Jesse B. Semple – “Simple”. It was in Harlem that I encountered the only rude spectator. I was taking a walk break when a guy yelled at me that I should be running, not walking. It was near mile 22 when I had this close encounter of the rude kind. At this point, I was having something similar to an out of the body experience but it was more demonic than heavenly. I felt myself hesitate, and for a fleeting moment, I contemplated turning around and getting in that dude’s face, and saying, “WTF!! I don’t see you out here running!!” But I didn’t because I was moving in the direction of the finish line, which was only 4 miles away, and some imbecilic jerk was not going to steer me off course!
I don’t recall the change from Harlem to the Upper East Side. One would assume it would be fairly obvious, yet I don’t recall it. It’s possible at that point I was temporarily catatonic because one moment I was running past a run down building and the next I was on Millionaire’s Row. It was quiet on the Upper East Side – no bands, no blaring music out of buildings – just happy spectators, cheering and waving. Were these the same spectators that saw the elite runners hours ago? Had they been standing there all day? For the last 3 miles, I tried to run as much as possible. I shortened my stride, significantly, which must have looked weird, because it felt weird. I imagined that I was moving like a Geisha taking quick, short, tiny steps. I cranked my iPod and looked straight ahead, totally in a zone. I could hear spectators yelling out to me, telling me I was almost there. At 86th Street, the course went into Central Park. I love Central Park and wish that more than 2 miles of the race had been in the park. And then, all of sudden, at about mile 24 ½, I felt someone right next to me. It was Rachel!! I had passed her and David when I entered the park, but was so in my zone and into my music that I didn’t hear them shouting out to me, so Rachel sprinted to catch up with me! I could feel the dried sweat on my face cracking as I smiled a HUGE smile and, surprisingly, I did not cry. I wanted to stop and hug her, but I had to keep moving. Having her run along side of me, even for that New York minute, was the #1 highlight of the marathon! As I turned onto whatever park road that is (Center Drive?) which parallels W. 59th Street, I had less than a mile to go; so where the hell was the finish?! I expected to see it ahead of me and all I saw was Columbus Circle, where we were the night before at Whole Foods. And then the course turned again on to West Drive and there was a stage set up with someone making announcements, saying we were almost there and I went through a type of shoot and then I saw the mile 26 sign and the signs counting down the meters and I finally I could see the finish ahead of me!! And so I ran and ran and ran and I crossed the finish and screamed “YES!!!!” and threw my arms up in victory! Hallelujah it was over! I finished! I ran the New York City Marathon! Now I can retire from marathons! As for my 6:11:00 finish time, it was 12 minutes over my goal of completing the race in under 6 hours. Initially, I struggled with trying not be disappointed with my time; but after spending a marathon amount of time reliving the experience by writing this post, I’m better than okay about my time, because for me, it’s not really about the actual time, it’s about the experience and it was the most memorable race experience ever and one of the top ten most memorable experiences of my life!
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