The Joe Nation 2007 NYC Marathon Log

3am 7 hours to start
Wide awake.
Is it the time change? The cats don't know about the time change and want me to get up. Get up. Give snacks to cats. Three greenie fish each. Lay back down. Wide awake. The fast music from the training site is playing in my head.
Dit dit dit dit di boom.
This is not good, I want to start out slow.
Ditdit dit dit boom boom.
I roll on my side and stare out the window at the branches of the trees. Good. They are not moving, maybe the winds have already died.
Dit dit dit dit di boom.

4am Six hours to start.
I get up. I wash my face and weigh in. 197.2 Great. The carbo-loading of the past week hasn't pushed me over 200 pounds. I'm still 60 pounds less than I was two years ago. The cats are very excited, there's a chance I may have forgotten about the other greenie fish and they will get seconds. I grind the coffee, throw a frozen bagel in the microwave and get the espresso maker going.
My running stuff is ready to put on. It was checked two dozen times, no three dozen times, last night. I pull on my shorts, the orange jersey and get my socks on just as the coffee starts flowing. I foam the milk. Zap the bagel for 38 seconds and give the cats three more greenies each. I put on my shoes. I check to see that I have ten energy gels in my pockets. In the back pocket, zipped up are my Amex, my MetroCard and forty bucks cash and emergency paper towels. For emergencies.
I sign on to A2K.
I re-tie my shoes.
Sip coffee.
Post something about here I go.
I re-tie my right shoe.
I re-tie my left shoe.

Here I go.

5:00AM 5 hours to start
5:frigging 20AM!! On the A train finally! after waiting and waiting and waiting.
(What is the NYC Subway Weekend Rule? Right. No trains run on the weekend the way they run at other times.)
Next find out number 1 train not stopping at 59th street after getting off at 59th street to catch the 1.
Find that out from group of out of town runners-a woman from Kansas City with her husband and five guys from Philadelphia-New Jersey-Florida-England and Japan.
I tell them I'm from the city and we will take the R from 42th. They believe me, get on the next A train and follow me through the tunnel at 42nd Street down to the N/R platform. There is much talk amongst us. I am the only one never to have a run a marathon.

I remember that I didn't eat the bagel in the microwave.

6AM 4 hours to the start
We are still on the R train. We still have to get to the Staten Island Ferry, cross the harbor, get on a shuttle bus, get to the launching area, put out baggage on the trucks, re-tie our shoes and get ready. No one is panicked. There's a ferry every half hour that can take 5000 runners.

We get to the ferry at 6:40 and I tell everyone to get as close as they can to DOOR ONE. We slip through the crowd, inching our way forward. There are at least eight thousand runners already there waiting, some sitting near the door, but most are standing back. Our little group gets within twenty yards of the door. Massa, the guy from Japan, says it's just like home.
TWO ferries arrive at 6:55 and they announce boarding. Everyone moves forward elbow to elbow to elbow. It's a crush moving slowly to the door. Someone has their hand on my tush. I hope it's the woman from Kansas City but when I look it's a woman I've never seen before. "Sorry." she says. "Zoekay" I say. The guy from Japan says it's just like home.

I lead our little group, including the tush pusher to the front of ferry. We'll be some of the first to get off to get onto the busses.
We look out the windows. Before the boat turns they can see the Statue of Liberty. I am suddenly starving. I eat one of my gels.
The Verrazano Bridge swings into view.
It looks very long in the morning light.


7:30 AM 2.5 hours to Start
I've lost the group in the newest crush. There are ten thousand runners waiting patiently for the next line of busses to arrive. We are elbow to elbow again. The whole St.George Station is a sea of humanity. Slowly the mass moves up the stairs. Some people are trying to go out the side door, but I've run two Half Marathons here and know that out that door there is no way to get to the bus platform. I tell that to some folks near me. We watch as the escapees sullenly re-appear.

The mob keeps moving. There are no impatient voices. Hundreds of busses are lined up as we exit and move down the line onto them. We roar off towards the bridge.

8AM Two Hours to the Start
First, I have to pee. So do the other 39,926 runners. I decide to wait. I need to find my baggage truck so I can put the clothes that I will put on at the finish on the truck. I need to find my start corral where we will line up a thousand at a time to get in line for the mass start. Voices over the loud speakers repeat instructions, directions and greetings in French, German, Japanese, Italian and English.
There is a buzz of humanity here.
I wait in a long line in front of some porta-potties. Some people are in and out in seconds. Some doors never re-open the whole time I am there.
(I am one of the quick ones)

9AM One hour to go.
I cannot move. I have been caught in another massive crowd. This time all trying to get to the baggage trucks at the same time. Luckily, I know where the truck I need to get to is, many people don't know which way to go, but there is no going anyway. No one is moving. I cannot see what is holding up the crowd, but everyone is running out of time. We'd like to get our stuff on the trucks, we'd like to have some time to stretch, we need some time to breathe, maybe have another pee, but there is no moving.

9:30 Thirty minutes to go.
I haven't gotten to the truck yet but I see a skinny fellow ahead of me slide between two of the UPS trucks with his bag. As the crowd inches forward I get to the same gap and though I am a bit wider than the other guy, I slip into the space and then pray that the trucks are the same distance apart at the other end as they are at this end. They are. I pop out the other side and there is my truck and -- there is no one putting baggage on it-- no line of frantic runners, no crowd. This is so weird.

I give the bag to the lady on the truck, she checks my number and I am off to battle my way back through the crowd to the corrals. Two cops have opened a piece of fencing and are letting all the people who have their bags on the trucks pass back through.

9:45 AM Fifteen Minutes to the Start
I can't get to my corral. All the others have already lined up one thousand strong, and there are fifteen corrals between me and mine, so I have to climb over a bunch of pipes and construction material to get past and around them. It's like a straddle exercise course except that I think at any moment I am going to fall and break an ankle. I've stripped down to just my running jersey and shorts with just my old faded green biking jacket (The one I wore on five thousand bicycle rides in Oklahoma.) keeping me warm. I'm slipping and sliding on the pipes and it take me forever to get to where I can cut through to the thousand people I supposed to be with.

9:58AM
We are moving down the path through a bit of woods to toll booths of the Verrazano Bridge. Our view of the bridge is blocked by a line of busses. I stop on the left to re-tie my shoes and am joined first by two others and then three more runners, all of us, frantically pulling on laces and trying to make loops the right length, with the right tightness, we are all kneeling there like some kind of pray group for madmen.

I look up, there are four, no five, helicopters above us.

We haven't made it around the corner of the buses, there is music blasting from the loudspeakers. Every one is talking and shaking hands and adjusting hats and sunglasses and shaking first one leg and then the other. I toss my old green jacket onto a fence, goodbye old friend.

I see a woman standing a few feet away. She is wearing a fleece coat and a full length woolen skirt, a head scarf covers her hair.

"How in the hell is she going to run 26.2 miles in that?" I say to myself.

But then the cannon goes off.

KA BOOM
And here I go.

Five and a half hours of running.


Joe(That's a long time to do anything)Nation

What a hazzerai...

Are there pics of you crawling over those pipes? And whipping Katie Holmes's arse?

Great report.

Loving it, Joe. Glad the man who can run can also write.

Somewhere in these posts will be a list of errors, mis-steps, mistakes and total fuckups I made before, during and after this trek.

It is a long list.

Near the top is the decision not to bring my Palm/cellphone/camera.

Joe("The Hours" comes tonight)Nation

Wow, looks like more people than the Boston marathon.

Have you ran the Boston marathon?

There we go!

My heart skipped a beat at the part where you realized you didn't eat your bagel. And you never had a chance to eat anything else but that dang energy gel? You ran a marathon on no breakfast? Whoa.

Congrats on straying (relatively) calm.
I would have been totally freaked.

the pen is mightier than the running shoe...

I'm more anxious now than I was on Sunday.


Dang that JoeN and his build-up.

Wait, George, there's more,

but not tonight.

For some odd reason I am exhausted.

Joe(writing this up has made me just as wired as the day before the run)Nation

I'm really curious what this odd reason could be :wink:

Marathon
First Hour (0-6 miles)
The Start


The cannon's boom is still humming in the cables of the Verrazano bridge when we hear the last few bars of Sinatra's New York, New York ,the emcee screams something about Bruce and "Born to Run" begins blaring. See that L of buses in the picture??
The spot I am standing in is behind the bottom of the L between the bus nearest the corner and the next one. There a guy peeing between the two buses, the lady in the long skirt has disappeared. The air is filled with people shouting in French, "Viva la France!!" and Italian, "Italia, Italia, Italia!!" Somebody shouts "Let's go YANKees!"
We inch forward until I get around the corner and the view opens up.

There in front of me all the way up the bridge's span, as far as one can see, is a river of runners.
Heads are bouncing and bobbing, floating, rising, falling.
Hands and fists are being thrust into the morning air.
39,000 sets of feet, 39,000 sets of shoulders.
There's waves of runners and crosscurrents of runners, one part of the mass slows, another surges, a great tidalwave of every form of human being there is on earth, right here and flowing to the horizon.
There are flags, there are great arcs of balloons, the air is filled with the applause and helicopter noise and cheers in languages familiar and completely unknown.



I was not prepared for what happened next...
as I began to run to the starting line it suddenly hit me that I was really there.

That,
after all the runs at the crack of dawn,
all the treks up the hill behind the Cloisters in the freezing cold,
all the slogging and jogging and traffic dodging,
all the hundreds of circuits of Central Park clockwise
and otherwise in every season and time of day,
all the races done to qualify,
all the miles up and down the East bank of the Hudson,
all those lung busting hills by the George Washington Bridge,
all those hills on Overlook and Bennett in the Heights,
every step and action from that first "speed walk" two and a half years ago,
from the twenty minutes per mile "run" to the lighthouse
to the last minute gallop for a personal record for 5M a week ago,
from buying my first real pair of running shoes
down to the two perfect doubleknots I just tied two minutes ago,
all of it
had brought me here to this moment.

The tears began flooding up on me but just before I really lost it
I heard a voice,

the same voice which had gotten me out of my bed on my days off work to run,

"Hey," the voice said, "now that you are here you actually have to run this frigging thing!! Then you can cry your eyes out."

"Okay." I said, "That's a deal."

And I crossed the start line behind six Italians holding hands as if they were finishing instead of just getting started.




Joe(and we went over the river and through the woods)Nation

Wonderful!

Schniff..

I wonder what the combined weight of all the runners on the bridge was.

How much weight is the V-bridge built to withstand.

Let's see.... 39,500 X 120-170 (avg)= 3000 tons or so.
Beats me. I have heard that some people have reported hearing the cables of the bridge 'singing' as the mob crosses.
Might be the wind or adrenalin.
Here's one more shot of us on the bridge.

Rules are made to be trampled. (2-6)
The First Rule of Running a Marathon is
Do Not Start Off Too Fast
This seems like a reasonable and easy to understand concept.
It is also the easiest to break.

Hey! There I am breaking the rule!


Yes, that's me right in the center of that bunch, I'm wearing the orange shirt, black shorts and white hat? See me?
See how I seem to be surrounded by people who look a lot faster than I am?
That's because I am.

On the back of that orange shirt is a Pace Team Time bib, I picked Four Hours and Forty Five Minutes because, well, because I thought I could do the race in four hours and forty five minutes.


At the start we were supposed to find out Pace Team Captains. These are people who have finished so many marathons that they can run one at whatever pace they want to. Four and half hours? No problemo . Five Hours? Sure thing.
"Just find the Pace Captain of your Pace Team and stay with them through the whole race. They will be carrying a big bunch of balloons so you can see them in the distance if you get behind. They run a steady pace, just tag along."

Yep.

The only problem was that I never saw my 4:45 Pace Captain at the start, nor did I ever see the 4:45 Pace Team Captain during the entire race,
but that wasn't my problem going into the streets of Brooklyn.

The problem was all the Pace Team bibs around me in that picture say things like 3:30 and 3:15.

(Gulp.)
So.... right about the four mile point I began to slow down. A lot. At least I thought I was slowing down a lot, but every time at new mile marker came up, I was right on pace for a four hour and forty minute marathon.
Six mile goal? 1:05:13
Ten kilometer time?
(6.2 miles, close enough) 1:05:02.

So, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Was I out too fast? The numbers didn't say that, but all these speedy runners around me made me wonder... .

Meanwhile, the people of Brooklyn had turned out to greet the great herd of humanity. The world may have been running by them but they were the world as well. They were wonderful.
There were bands playing rock and bands playing metal and bands playing hot salsa. Everyone was cheering us, even the volunteers at the Gatorade and Water stops. Big bunches of people lined every sidewalk and every turn in the road. They shouted out Viva Italia! and Viva la France! and all the runner's names.
Stacey!
Hey, Mike!
Go, Danny, you're the man!
Stella, Stella, Stella!! (really)
(Note to self: wear your name on your front next time, you dope. No one looks at the runners once they are past them.)

Watching this video The Course out to be the best training device of all. Although I had never been to that part of Brooklyn, (who goes to Red Hook on purpose?) I could see out there in front of me the church steeple and, at six miles, the big tall building that would mark the eight mile mark.

Joe(I was cruising.)Nation

This is so exciting, I need more. Im reading and Im all verklempt and proud and conflicted because Im sure that you are now a full fledged helthy person , and Im jelous.

I did recognize you, Joe!