Choking on the Big Apple

I signed up to do the NYC marathon.  In my research coming to this marathon, one writer referred to is as the world’s most inconvenient marathon. There is no more appropriate description. I must pick up my packet in one part of town.  Once I have my official bag I must go three miles away which is an hour in New York time to Central Park. After dropping off things I might want tomorrow after the race, I must fight my way back to my hotel. Then there is getting to the buses by 5AM which will cart us across town to the start on Staten Island.  There I have three and a half hours to sit around in the cold. Anything I take there I will not be allowed to bring back with me. It will all be donated on my behalf. It means that the runners dress like homeless people and the homeless end up looking like runners. Finally there is the race itself which seems like a very brief blurb in the midst of this drama. Once finished I am marched a full mile before I even get to think about finding my loved ones or dry clothes or food and starting the hour long walk home. I paid for this. Don’t cry for me.

That said, I did sign up two years ago. I was a different person then. I was happy and motivated. But what I thought was a good idea two years ago does not hold true now. Many ideas I come up with I later decide are very terrible ideas. That was just two weeks ago. Sometimes as little as two hours. I am not the same person I was two years ago. The cells that composed me two years ago have long since died and sloughed off. I am basically a brand new person and unfortunately the person that replaced me is now old, slow and tired.

I have run more marathons that I care to go back and count. The show is old but sentimental for me. I have no hope for one last great race but I do hope I have the wisdom to make this my last race. I am basically on my retirement tour. Still I must do all the things that make me feel like I might run a great race like study the course to the finest detail and meticulously prepare my gear. All of my preparations will be entirely for show as the airlines will get me there many hours late and I won’t go to bed until 1AM. The restaurant I book for dinner the night before the race will be in downtown, not midtown, as I, a simpleton from the West, will not differentiate, meaning we have no dinner reservations. I will discover the next day that I am missing one arm warmer, the air tag device is not connected to the necessary phone giving loved ones my location, nor did I remember the very important lube to keep myself from looking like I took a cheese grater to my skin for three hours. All things pointed to the fact I am getting dementia and should probably stop now or else someday I will start a race and never find my way home. This is how old runners die.

For the first time I have a newbie with me. He does not run. He does not understand running. The one race he attended was two months ago. At that time he dutifully gathered me from the finish of my half marathon and unaware of more appropriate hydration recommendations, promptly procured me an Aperol spritz because we were in Italy and it was almost noon. He had no idea what he was getting himself into with the marathon and I worried he was undertrained even though I started researching where he should stand weeks ahead of time.

One necessary stop was the expo where I picked up my race number and official t shirt. In a race as large as NYC, this is an event. It is packed and bustling with nervous energy and there are a lot of venders feeding the chaos with free samples and unbeatable discounts. Here you can pay extraordinary prices for ordinary gear because it is stamped with the NYC logo. The frenzy has people fighting for the very last orange and pink hoody like it the key to survival while surrounded by hundreds of other options. Imagine Black Friday for the running nerd. For us, it was the fastest expo pick up ever. No need to check out the latest gadgets in running for him. Sentimental photos for Instagram? Nope. An excellent reminder that one man’s Everest is another man’s business trip.

The next morning was much waiting around. Bereft of a phone for a whole 4 hours, I was forced to interact with people or at least observe others like a stalker. There I stretched as a man came to sit down on the curb next to me. He was wearing a sweatshirt with one of those big kangaroo pockets on the front. Out of it came a 1.5 L bottle of water and a second half liter bottle. I would have been impressed with just this. I would have to pee every mile if I drank all this. At least I can do it while running. Men tell me that they must stop to address this basic human need. But this man pulled out an additional buffett. It included 3 bananas and two large energy bars. He was dutifully chowing through it all. Mind you, I am unable to eat and run without projectile vomiting so this, too, impressed me. But the man had one more trick up his sleeve and this was a full hard cover book. The book was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. This book was written by a neurosurgeon who gets terminal lung cancer during his residency. It is quite moving but it is not the sort of book I would be reading minutes before starting. Spoiler alert: he dies! I thought maybe he was just trying to finish the last few pages before running but no, this man cracked the spine of a new hardcover and started on page 1 of the prologue.

I used to watch Miracle, the movie about the 1980 US hockey team that won gold against the USSR, before big races because I found it so inspiring. I had even asked Coach for some good book recommendations for the trip. However as yet another example that I was unprepared, I had brought nothing to read at the start line. It did have me contemplating what I would chose if I ever changed my routine and settled in with a book as a way to warm up before hammering a marathon. I need to read more because I couldn’t come up with one.

I love books so I now felt invested in the outcome of this reading. It seemed like such a waste to start the book then leave it behind. I hated to see him toss the book into the goodwill bin. It looked brand new! Did he plan to run with it? Maybe there was someone he was planning to hand it to when we got to Brooklyn. Suddenly I hoped to witness one of those freakish speed readers. The book isn’t very long so not impossible. How can you possibly start a book and then quit? Alas, people started to move, the man disappeared and I have never been so disappointed. I felt like I had vicariously started the book and not finished. But now I was completely off my game because I was forced to look for that book for the next 26 miles. I needed to know where it ended up even if I already knew how it ended.

The race had a few hiccups. The personal guide I hired to take My Man around bagged out at 4:00 in the morning. Whether or not he actually had the flu, I will never know but I hope it was in fact the plague given the last minute notice. My Man did manage to make it to Brooklyn by himself but found coffee instead of me. He also found his way back to Manhattan but as I suspected he was impossible to find in the crowds. He was unprepared for appropriate level of vocalization it requires to overcome thousands of people screaming and he would not consider wearing a florescent cowboy hat because it didn’t match his shoes. Who could blame him? New York does set a high bar for fashion. If you are going to go that route, you should also be wearing rainbow chaps.

About 20 miles in, I realized why people look at me funny when I enthusiastically proclaim I run marathons. At that point, I could think of no good reason to be running a marathon either. I was ruining a perfectly good brunch. I slogged my way in because I paid $300 for that $7 participation medal and I needed proof of purchase. For his part, My Man reported that he had a very tough day walking 54 blocks and people were yelling in his ear the whole time which he thought was unnecessary. It was a hard race for him and understandably he required a nap after it all. I don’t know if there will be a next time. If there is, one of us will require a lot more training.