How do you know if someone has run a marathon? Wait for it... they will tell you. Ba boom!
Well at the moment I am that smug bore. It might feel like the end of days here in the US, with Donald Trump closing on Hillary Clinton and the Chicago Cubs finally winning the world series, but no matter who I am talking to I will bring the conversation around to the New York City Marathon.
I am like a teenager in love, and nobody in human history has ever felt this way and I need to corner you and tell you all about it.
I have been living in New York now for two and a half years. I had only visited here before. So for the first summer, I would register online for a race every week and go to a part of the city I had never been. And there I would run.
I joined a running club North Brooklyn Runners (NBR) who have training sessions near our apartment in Greenpoint. I volunteered on their marathon fluid station in 2014 and it was during that race that the sheer scale of the New York marathon dawned on me. Fifty thousand runners. Fifty thousand separate stories. All that human flesh and pain running past in wave after wave of sweaty anguished faces. For three hours they pass the table.
Then finally comes the vehicle that no runner ever wants to encounter. Like a vulture behind the last runner on the course; the Sweeper Bus. On that bus, are the broken and injured. Those whose dreams of marathon glory and months of pain and hard miles on the road have brought them to this. You see them through the windows, disconsolate, wrapped in a heat blanket nursing a hamstring or a calf. They will be on that bus for another three hours. It is all I can do not to bless myself as it passes.
So I joined New York Road Runners who have a scheme for any New Yorker to gain entry to the marathon. I run nine NYRR races and volunteer once in a calendar year and boom I am in!
Once the snow thaws in March training begins in earnest. The first long race is the Brooklyn Half Marathon which finishes on the board walk in Coney Island. In the last two miles of that race I feel terrible aches in my hips and lower back. The idea of running for another two and a half hours seems absurd, delusional. I consulted an NBR oracle. “You must work on your core, young Jedi the legs are strong but the back is weak. You must plank and crunch.”
Plank and crunch I did. Soon I was running half marathon distances once a week as part of my regular routine. My route took me from Greenpoint down through the Hassidic neighbourhood on Flushing avenue to the Brooklyn Bridge and back. The area around Brooklyn bridge is called Dumbo (Down Under Brooklyn bridge, geddit?) and it is usually packed with tourists, photographers and film crews, all of them using the iconic bridge as a back drop. In the summer heat there is a nice breeze that comes off the water and the wedding groups and models posing for pictures make for a very entertaining morning run.
Last week NBR had a pre-marathon town hall where we got to ask veteran runners for advice. The woman leading the talk is on posters and busses all over New York crossing the finish line in a tutu and a pink NBR singlet. We talk about carb loading, ice baths, bonking (American for hitting the wall), chafing and the hardest part of the course (Fifth Avenue, around mile 22 before you enter Central Park is a mile and a half up a small hill).
I have been tapering for the last two weeks. Just short runs to keep the legs supple. I am jumpy with pent up energy. I am ready, I feel good. Too good? I am nervous. That sweeper bus is out there.
Did I tell you I was running a marathon?
