The Monday before my second New York City Marathon, I was at Avenue Sky Lounge at the Peak, perched on the 101st floor of 30 Hudson Yards, for the after-party to the New York premiere of Everest: The Other Side. A good room for thinking about big climbs. Rich Roll, the ultra-endurance athlete and podcaster, was there.
We got to talking about Sunday. He admitted he was nervous. A year and a half earlier, after spinal fusion surgery, his surgeon had told him to forget about running.
If a man who has built a life on going long was nervous, I figured I was allowed to be, too. I drifted to the window to look at what we were nervous about. Far to the south, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, where the marathon starts, was a thin strand of light.
Turn around, and there was the dark rectangle of Central Park, where it ends. Brooklyn, Queens, a corner of the Bronx, the long canyon of First Avenue. You can look at the route on a map forever to try to familiarize yourself with the course and come up with a race plan—don’t bomb up or down the Verrazzano because you’ll pay for it on the Queensboro Bridge, keep it steady in Brooklyn, give it everything on Central Park South.
I’d run this course before. And still, from up there, no matter how much I’d planned, I had to ask myself: I signed up for what? Six days later, there was no backing out.
At 4 A.M. on Sunday I was on the F train. This being the morning after Halloween, I had company: a car full of people in costume, Darth Vader and Rosie the Riveter among them, ending their night as I was starting my day. It was also the morning the clocks fell back.
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