The NY marathon was quite an adventure. It didn't turn out quite the way I had hoped. It's over and we finished and I'm proud that although we encountered enormous challenges, we persevered.The logistics for getting 40,000 people from Manhattan to Staten Island where the race begins could be a nightmare, but the race organizers seem to have that part of the race down to a science. It's the back end that needs some work.Every entrant is assigned a seat on a bus that leaves from a predetermined destination. Steve and I were staying downtown near the financial district and our bus location was uptown at the library. The ultimate destination was the Staten Island Ferry terminal. We decided to take the train directly to the terminal and get a few extra hours of sleep. We left the hotel at 6:15am and arrived at the terminal at 6:40am, just in time to join several thousand others for passage on the ferry to Staten Island.
Once we reached Staten Island, there were buses lined up and ready to take us to Fort Wadsworth where several villages were set up as base camps. We were in the green village corral, third wave (last). It was about a mile walk to the "village". Once there, a variety of booths and hundreds of porta potties were set up. There were refreshments including bagels, coffee, power bars, and water. But there was no place to get warm. Steve and I managed to find a spot behind a tent that was out of the wind and hunkered there for 2+ hours.
When it was time for our wave, we lined up with the massive crowd. There were swat teams posted at the building tops and several black hawk helicopters flew above us. The gun sounded at 10:20am but we didn't get to the start until 10:40am. The start line was at the foot of the Verrazano Narrows bridge. It was uphill from there. My hill training paid off and I had no problems. Our pace was just at a 15 minute mile. By the time we got over the bridge, there were very few people behind us. By the time we made it to mile 3, the crowds were beginning to thin out. When we got to mile 8, the water stations started to close down. After we crossed the 15K mat, there were no longer mile markers. We reached the Pulaski bridge where the 13.1 mat was, but the walkers were directed to use the pedestrian walkway and we did not get to cross the mat. From there on things deteriorated. We had no mile markers and didn't know how far we had gone. It wasn't until around mile 17, when we stopped in a Starbucks to get something to drink that the spouse of a runner told us where we were.
To make matters worse, although 1st Avenue was closed to through traffic, cross traffic was allowed to move and New York's finest decided that we straggler walkers would have to wait for the red lights to turn green. Around mile 18, Steve started having trouble with his back and his breathing, so we slowed down considerably to take stretching breaks and regroup. I told him numerous times that if he didn't feel up to finishing, that I was OK with calling it quits, but he persisted. When we got to mile 22ish, we took a wrong turn off 5th avenue, but luckily another slow poke saw us and yelled for us to turn the other way. Thankfully, we were able to follow the blue line in the road until we got to Central Park. When we entered the park, it was pitch black. The lights were not all on and it was difficult to see. There was a 24 mile banner up in the trees and that gave us hope. We thought we had gone about 2 miles, when the 25 mile marker appeared. We started to see some trucks that were taking down the barriers and knew we were getting closer. We circled around to Columbus Circle,out of the park and finally saw someone motioning us down to the finish area. We kept going for what seemed like a long time and made it to the chute. The finish line was still up. We made it across in 8 hours and 15 minutes. Our times didn't show up at the website, but we got our medals.
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