Fifth Time’s A Charm

Say something positive, she said, after hearing my rantings over all the things that went wrong at Sunday’s New York City Marathon. As usual, Dearest Spouse is right. Stay positive.

Positive: I failed to break the world record. I finally ran this thing. It took five tries (the bib on my back proved it), and you may recall my previous post where I posited that should I miss on this fifth try, zero for five just might be a record. But the record of futility was not to be. It happened. 

Positive: The odyssey through the five boroughs that is the New York City Marathon is an epic journey, an unparalleled experience, a bucket list event. It’s an entirely different character from Boston, which leads you from the Hinterlands to the Big City; this one is a journey through cultures and neighborhoods and cityscapes that are perpetually changing and delighting the eye (in most cases). Starting on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, astounding in scale when you’re not in a vehicle (and amusing as the EZ-Pass gantry keeps flashing as it photographs all those runners without transponders), through Brooklyn’s skyline which dazzles like Emerald City with vistas of soaring towers perfectly aligned to the avenues, through Queens over the 59th Street Bridge, which, despite what the others will tell you, is NOT a significant hill (nor was the Verrazano for that matter), to the almost hominess of the brief stretch through the Bronx, nothing spectacular, just fine folk cheering you on till you cross the Last (****ing) Bridge, and on to the dramatic finish in Manhattan and Central Park. This was something I had to do, and it was an amazing day. 

Positive: I returned to racing not only for the first time since COVID (not counting the virtual Boston), but also since the injuries of the summer prior. And yeah, I’ve still got this, even if I am a hell of a lot slower now. I remembered all that tribal knowledge gained over the years of managing heat and water and pace and all that jazz, and the marathon racing mindset (even if slow and not truly racing) came right back. I loved being back in that zone. 

And then, also Positive: The COVID test I took Thursday morning. Yep. Those 50,000 friends I hung out with Sunday? Apparently not all of them had my best interests in mind. My two-and-three-quarter-year streak of avoiding the ‘rona has ended. Symptoms are mild, no major worries – went for a run, did yard work, hacked up a lung. I should’ve known when they blasted out New York, New York at the start that they were singing, “Start spreadin’ the germs…” 

So I’ve done my duty to go positive. But there were a whole bunch of things that were positively not positive, two of which seriously impacted the outcome, one of those being, well, inexcusable. I can’t tell the tale without going, um, let’s say, anti-positive. 

Despite my complaints about certain aspects of the Boston Marathon over the years, I have to say I’m spoiled. The Boston Athletic Association has this game figured out, or maybe it’s just Dave MacGillivray we have to thank. The New York Road Runner’s Club’s execution of the New York City Marathon? For an event billed as the largest marathon, period, an event that has been staged for over fifty years, I expect you folks have the big things figured out. Minor flaws I let slide. But…what happened Sunday wasn’t minor. 

First things first: I will never ever ‘dis’ the volunteers. Thousands of them. Every one giving it their all. Every one of them awesome. I thank them. I praise them. Chalk up another positive. 

But the professional organizers who hung me and thousands of my compatriots out to dry and hamstrung many of our race performances? Thumbscrews for you. Inexcusable dereliction of duty. 

That’s a pretty serious charge there, so let’s go into it. In New York, you can reach the start on Staten Island by taking a bus from mid-town Manhattan or by finding your own way to the tip of the island and taking the ferry, which sounded like more fun (there are other options, but we’ll simplify). Off the ferry it’s a twenty-minute shuttle bus to the starting village. Or at least it’s supposed to be. 

To this point, my day was going swimmingly. Awake? Early (even slept well). Out of the hotel? Early. On the subway? Train rolled in as I cleared the turnstile. Ferry? Again, early, slated for the 7:00 but on board the 6:15. The ride? Phenomenal, hanging out on the rail in a mild breeze, the company grand, the views of the city and the Statue of Liberty divine, our Coast Guard escort showing off with speed-boat joy-ride loop-de-loops (awesome pic courtesy of fellow runner and ferry-mate Lily!), what a trip! Docked at Staten Island, all is well. 

And then it all went to hell. 

I struggle to understand what came next. There simply was no plan at the far end. And it’s not like they haven’t done this so many times before. Who was asleep at the wheel? And why have we heard nary a peep of apologies since? 

We walked off the boat into an unorganized mass of humanity stretching a city block and a hundred people deep. No lines, no order, no guidance, no assurance you’d ever get out. On the far edge of this mass, a string of buses would pull in with no defined stopping or loading points and the mass would surge. After several surges, the mass morphed from pleasant to so tightly compressed that you couldn’t squat to rest or stretch your legs, let alone sit. The clouds burned off and we broke out in sweat, dehydrating before even arriving. Everyone tried to be polite, but order didn’t simply break down, it never existed. Another string of buses, we’d shove forward a foot, with forty yards to go. But with no order on the loading edge, no lanes, no safety barriers, just a swarming mass, even the buses had a hard time slipping in, compounding the situation. We found ourselves jammed hip to hip, far more intimate than even friends should be. Runners fruitlessly raised hands yelling, “Wave One” or “Wave Two” and tried to slice through to board, and we tried to oblige, but it just wasn’t possible; they missed their starts and had to join later waves and fight the traffic, oh the traffic, we’ll get to that part of the story, trashing their goals. Still having a mask in my pocket from the subway ride and for the bus, at some point I realized this was no longer an “outdoors” situation and I donned it, knowing I’d missed any window to avoid COVID exposure. It’s no surprise I’m now coughing, popping Paxlovid, and have a voice made for late-night radio. 

Two. Solid. Hours. 

Two hours standing jammed crammed baking trashing my legs, wobbly and fatigued before I finally boarded a bus. Having started the morning early on all counts, I stumbled into the starting village a mere ten minutes before my corral was scheduled to load, hyper-fatigued, having missed pre-race nutrition and hydration (in part due to the odd layout of the village where water was hard to find, but to be fair, the starting corral system was phenomenal), and trying hard to compartmentalize what had just happened into the “it must have been a bad dream” box while my legs and body quivered. 

Let’s back up for a moment and recall that over the last few years, I slipped from rather competitive to entirely not. But over this past year, I was starting to feel pretty good again. While I never expect to return to the low-three-hour range, never mind the old sub-three days, I came to New York with no public goals but a back-of-the mind thought that I could probably notch a qualifier to return to Boston. And sure, the forecast was for too warm, but experience pays, I could manage that (and I did). But I didn’t expect to have to manage being wiped out before the race started. 

But then we’re walking onto the Staten Island Expressway, and who cares? Start spreadin’ the news! I’m leavin’ today! I want to be a part of it! New York, New York! To hell with all that came before, we’re running across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and I’m in geeky engineer heaven, staring up at the towers, scoping the drop off the side to the harbor, humanizing the normally violently vehicular space. This supposed biggest hill, which truly rises to about two hundred and fifty feet, is so gradual that as a born-and-bred hill runner, I don’t even notice. My first mile split sucks, but that’s more due to traffic than the fact that I’m rising to the top of the bridge. 

Ah yes. Traffic. Problem number two charged to the New York City Marathon, and, to be fair, many of its participants. Because yes, there are fifty thousand people you have to get through the streets of New York, and that’s hard, so there are a couple of things you do. 

For starters, crowd control. There is not an inch of the Boston Marathon where the crowd impinges on the race. In contrast, there were numerous places in New York where crowds didn’t know what the curb meant and nobody was assigned to tell them. The fans were wild, loud, supportive, multi-cultural, inspiring, fantastic. But they didn’t seem to realize that we really needed those streets. In places the course was no wider than a lane and a half, if even that. It felt like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. 

Second, revisit the self-seeding system. This is hard, and I’m not sure what the answer is; maybe, with my big-city-marathon experience limited to Boston, which is based on qualifier times, maybe I’m just not used to being in the masses of a major marathon? Narrow lanes wouldn’t be a big deal if most everyone was moving along, but that wasn’t the case. 

Since you’re seeded on your self-predicted time, it would seem that never has there been a group of people more out-of-touch with their abilities than the participants of this marathon. I can’t quite fathom how so many of those seeded around or ahead of me were so slow – nor can I fathom the numbers of walkers, even early on, and how many of them seemed to have no clue to move out of the center of the course. At some points such as heading up the 59th Street Bridge, I’d estimate ninety percent of the field was walking. Sure, it was warm, and sure, that impacts some people differently than others, but that doesn’t explain what I saw. 

The numbers were staggering, as was the impact. Long-time readers know I try to avoid quoting numbers; this is about telling a story, not numbing you with stats. But numbers tell the story here. Consider that the time I forecast, which was only a few minutes slower than what I ran, slotted me for a bib in the mid-twenty-eight-thousands (out of about sixty thousand bibs). But I finished around seventy-five-hundredth (out of nearly forty-eight thousand finishers), a rough gain of twenty-one thousand places from start to finish. Of course, many started in different waves, so the more accurate measure is that I finished at about fourteen-and-a-half-thousandth based on (first wave) gun time, or in other words, I passed fourteen thousand people. If you do the math, that’s one person every second, and even if you assume a bunch of unassigned bibs and no-shows, both likely, you could drop that to passing three folks every four seconds, a rather insane amount traffic. 

In short, I was weaving around someone roughly every second. 

Layer that atop the crowd control issue, toss in more than a few sight-impaired runners with triple-wide two-guide entourages (don’t get me wrong, those folks are amazing and I don’t bemoan their guides, I bemoan the narrow course), and there were places where I was literally stuck. This race became a twenty-six-mile game of tag, deking left, swooping right, surging into gaps, backing off from blocks, every few strides. Exhausting! 

Alright, I hear you saying, you can’t blame the race for runners being out-of-touch with their inner gazelles, and you’re right. This is, to be fair, hard to fix in a marathon where most do not have to qualify. But may I suggest, dear organizers, that no matter how a runner gets into your race, if they can’t provide an actual half- or full-marathon time (just for seeding, not for entry), maybe you don’t entirely trust them to make it up themselves. Provide guidance, which I don’t recall seeing during the sign-up process. Maybe extrapolate from their ten-kilometer time. I really don’t have a good answer, but try something, because what you’ve got doesn’t work. 

But let’s move to the third traffic issue: And this one’s entirely on you, New York. 

New York rightly welcomes “streakers” – those who have finished a large number of previous New York Marathons. They’re obvious, they wear back bibs with their finish count, which is great. But New York puts them up front, even in the first wave. Ask anyone who has completed thirty-something of any race, and after you notice that they’re well ripened, you’ll hear them tell you they’ve slowed down and shouldn’t be up front. Hey, I’ve had my first corral days too, but guess what? I’ve slowed down and I shouldn’t be up front, either, no matter how many times I’ve run a given race. Many of these folks looked like they weren’t going to make it another block. And there were a surprisingly large number of them. More obstacles that just didn’t have to be. 

I know I’m sounding like the elitist, but… passing three people every four seconds on an unnaturally narrow course. Let that sink in. 

Adding this up, the pre-race bus melee leg trashing followed by agonizing and energy sapping unnecessarily thick and funneled traffic from start to finish meant my zone of solid performance ended about five miles earlier than it should have, around seventeen rather than in the twenties. Shortly after meeting Dearest Spouse on First Avenue (best. picture. ever.) (and about the only open part of the course), both calves announced they were really pissed off by all this extracurricular punishment and started twinging. With nine still to go, knowing that twinges beget full on cramps, I had to back off despite having plenty in the cardio bank. That outside stab at a Boston re-qualifier faded, save one last push near the end to try to reel it back in, which did in fact lead to a brief full-on calf seizure.

One might say you can’t draw a straight line from one of these events to another, but, well, yes, you can.

But let’s finish this by going back to positive. I wasn’t in any way unhappy with the outcome. Crossing the line and knowing that the rigors of the marathon were reduced to a good day’s work is a feeling I can’t deny is deeply satisfying. I’d made the tour, soaking in the grand and the obscure along the way. And after the race (did I mention the fans were, other than crowding the course, amazing?), strolling through the streets of Manhattan (which Dearest Spouse navigated like a pro and found me easily), I was truly heartened by the support of the city. We had about forty blocks’ walk back to the hotel, and on almost every streetcorner New Yorkers congratulated, extolled, fist-bumped, or in some way expressed their adulation. Thank you, New York, that almost makes up for the COVID!

Bucket list: Check, done, number thirty-two in the books. 

Repeat list: Nah. 

Short Takes 

Personal Worst: Not counting the virtual Boston of 2020, which was an official marathon, but I just can’t call a race, this was my slowest marathon. Yet interestingly on an age graded basis, it was only close to my slowest, edging a post-injury Boston and my very first one at Cape Cod. So in other words, seventeen years later I’m back where I started. 

It’s Just Not the Same Game: I’m used to Boston, where the time I ran would have me soundly crushed in the results. In New York, it put me at the top twelve percent in my age group, and I’m in the last year of that age group. It’s just a different world. 

Bad Vibes? Really, No Vibes: Part of the fun of a marathon is chatting it up with your fellow runners. While we did that a-plenty through the pre-race ordeal and again in the post-race walk-off, I’ve never experienced a less social crowd in-race. Part of the problem was that I was blowing by nearly everyone around me. Of the small subset near my pace, far too many were buried in their ear-pods and oblivious to all around them, something I highly frown upon. Of the remainder, several just didn’t respond when I tried to start up a conversation. Which makes it all the more notable that the ONE runner I had any decent chat with starting on the 59th Street Bridge and heading up First Avenue, Johan from the Netherlands, ended up in the shot that Dearest Spouse took on First. I was able to track him down and was pleased to hear he ran a personal best. 

It Was Only Us, Really: It's worth noting that those who used other offered transit options to the start had no idea what we ferry folks had just lived through. 

By The Way, Mile Markers Matter: Yeah, one more gripe. It didn’t surprise me when I missed the six- and seven-mile markers, as I often miss markers (and New York’s were annoyingly right on top of water stops, so taking a split while navigating water stop traffic, not the best arrangement). As such I expected the split on my watch at mile eight to look like three miles. Instead, it looked like about two and a half. There was no way that number made sense, and there was no possibility I’d have taken that split if there wasn’t a mile marker, so, um, yeah, what’s with that? Missed nine, so let’s find ten and I can reset my mental pace with easy divide-by-ten math. And there it is on the left side, the ten-mile marker, click the watch! Wait, what? Ten seconds later, there’s ten again, this time on the right side (and if you’re thinking, New York has three course groups, green, blue, and yellow, this was two miles after they merged, so that wasn’t it). Two ten-mile markers, ten seconds apart? Why is this so hard? 

You Call This Recovery? Knowing we’d be kicked out of our hotel Monday morning long before our afternoon train, we packed in backpacks to go mobile. Mine grew obscenely and probably weighed in at twenty-five to thirty pounds (not that Dearest Spouse’s wasn’t significant also), and with that behemoth on my back, somehow our brief city stroll turned into an eight-plus-mile odyssey. 

Why Tell Us? Tell New York Road Runners: You survived my moaning. Why am I telling you, not them? Well, the post-race survey arrived Tuesday. Good, I thought, I can unleash about the bus fiasco. Nope, it was all about, “What did you think of our sponsors?” Seriously. Nothing about the race itself. Just about the coin. Sad.