The author on the move.
Photo: Marathon Photo

Before Sunday, I had never run 26.2 miles in my life. Like many people preparing for their first marathon, I spent months training for the actual race and weeks building the perfect playlist for it. This was a meticulous, almost scientific process. For the first few miles, we lined up some laid-back live sets from the War on Drugs. For direct lines from Brooklyn: Big Thief. For the grueling inclinations of the Queensboro Bridge: a return to metal, with some propulsive Iron Maiden, Screaming Females and Sword. I timed my mix to end with “Feel Good, by the Detroit Cobras,” a song that makes me smile and jump every time I hear it—even, I theorized, after running for four hours. It would have been a great playlist if I ever got the chance to hear it.

A few meters from the start line of the marathon, there is a box set up for runners to donate clothes they wore to keep warm while waiting for the race to start. I had an old, battered sweatshirt that I had brought specifically to throw away for this purpose. As we all approached the line, with runners starting to jump up and down in nervous anticipation, I took off my hoodie and threw it in the box. Then I pulled out my phone, loaded up Spotify, and realized… I just threw my headphones in with my hoodie. The perfect playlist was for naught and I was about to embark on the most difficult physical test of my life in total silence – a man alone with his thoughts, hearing only his own footsteps and the ever-increasing gasps and gasps . of his own breath.

And it turned out to be the best part of the whole experience. The New York Marathon it’s not something to be filtered through one’s apps and bundled into algorithmic customizations. It’s best experienced with open ears, open eyes and, yes, I’m saying it: an open heart. To be among the people of New York for four hours is to be carried by them, and I would have missed so much if I had been enveloped in indie rock and death metal the whole time. Running a marathon means being transformed, learning things about yourself and the world around you that you couldn’t know before. And to do it on the eve of one choice that we have all justifiably spent weeks, months, years biting our nails while waiting was therapeutic in all the right ways (and some of the wrong ones).

It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced or anticipate ever experiencing. Here, the things you learn about yourself and the world by running the NYC Marathon.

A total out of 55,646 human beings completed the NYC Marathon this year, the largest number in the history of the race and about three times the capacity of Madison Square Garden. Organizers have to get all those runners to the start of the race in Staten Island—a place that, uh, most participants don’t frequent. They clear a 26.2 mile trail and make sure none of the runners die along the way. And must ensure that the city itself continues to hum as more than a million people line the streets to scream, drink and party all day. I’ve covered Super Bowls and World Series and the Olympics, and I’ve never seen anything as chaotic as the New York City Marathon. The city pulled it off like it was the easiest thing in the world, and did it with the good cheer that defines the race itself. Have you ever seen a police officer dancing to Beyoncé in the middle of a bridge while doing strangers? Now I have! New York will be able to do this without problems next year and every year. It’s incredible. And apparently the city doesn’t even need a mayor to do it.

I lived in New York for 14 years. On marathon days, I’d usually roll out of bed, cigarettes and heavy vodka screwdriver in hand, and incoherently cheer for people I didn’t know running faster. I did this mostly for myself, to feel useful, to feel like I was a part of something I would never have thought to participate in myself. Now that I’m a runner (and considerably healthier) and have been on the other side of that tightrope, I want to embrace his support. When you go out and encourage people, it legitimately makes a difference to them. I think it would have saved me in this race.

Encouraged by the cheering hordes, I was cooking for the first 18 miles of the race, actually going at a faster pace than my usual training runs. I felt like I was floating above the ground, like the crowd was carrying me through the air. Turns out it wasn’t—my legs were doing it, and my legs were mad at me for it: Around mile 19, out of nowhere, I suddenly started having severe leg cramps. It felt like every step I took landed my foot on a two-foot-tall iron post sticking out of the ground. I instantly pulled over to the side of the road, sat down, and began furiously massaging my calves and thighs, just trying to get them back to work. (See if you can tell where on the graph this happened.)

Graphic: Marathon Photo

I stood back up, leaned over the railing and tried to stretch my screaming calves, horrified that I had walked this far and done all this work only to come up short on the last leg. Then I noticed a group of young men making eye contact with me. I was in as bad pain as I’ve ever been in my life and I’m sure I forgot. But they didn’t look at me with pity or concern—they just yelled, almost in unison, “You got it, man!” And you know what? It really helped. Their enthusiasm didn’t ease my cramping muscles, but I pushed myself to keep going anyway, to repay their pure and entirely honest enthusiasm—to make their effort as worthwhile as mine. Much has been written about the joyous love fest that is the New York City Marathon, but I’m not sure it can be emphasized enough. People can be mean and cruel and inconsiderate; we all see it every day. But this was something basic and elementary: human beings supporting other human beings, simply because they are other human beings. I could barely walk the last two miles of the race. But after that, I couldn’t help but finish the bastard off. And I did it.

So get out there and cheer everyone on every year. You might already be drunk by 11am. It’s okay. You still help. You are still doing more than you might know.

When I learned that the marathon was held two days before the 2024 election, I thought of two things:

1) It would be helpful to do some physical activity to channel your political anxieties.

2) They would be reminders of the elections everywhere along the route.

I was extremely fair on the first, but only slightly so on the second. I’ve seen my fair share of camo “Harris Walz” hats (everyone seems to have arrived in the last week) – and plenty of “Run Like You’re Going to Vote” signs. But overall, the crowd seemed to take the race more as a respite from the election than I did. The only real political moment was one of my own making. Approaching Williamsburg, I was running on the left side of the street and saw an older man with a “Make America Great Again” hat, the only one I saw the entire race. Instinctively, I made eye contact with him and saw him lean forward slightly as I approached, as if he was relieved, after frowning all day, to see a white man in his 40s coming towards him. I smiled and shouted a cartoon “Boooo!” to him; everyone around him was laughing and he was smiling too. It was a jovial little moment for everyone involved and I’m still not sure why.

After the long zombie shuffle in Central Park West with my fellow haunted finishers, all wearing disaster blankets like we’d just survived multiple car crashes, I headed back to the hotel to meet up with family and stuff my face with carbohydrates and alcohol. There were a few other marathoners in the lobby and we gravitated towards each other like magnets. This happened the rest of the night and the next few days: every time you saw someone wearing a medal (and we all wear our medals all the time), you pointed at them and they pointed at you, and the two of you just he knew One of the many wonderful things about the New York City Marathon is one of the many wonderful things about New York itself: people come from all over the world to be a part of it, and everyone gets to mingle with everyone else. Late in the evening, as I was crawling after my overnight package back to the hotel, I saw two people wearing their medals while eating with their families and friends outside a Greek restaurant. One spoke French; the other, wearing a Pakistan team jacket that I saw several times during the race, spoke Urdu. They both saw me and my medal, stopped what they were saying and waved at me. I waved back as if I had run into a long lost friend. Which I think I had.

As much as I’d like to say I got over my election nerves, that’s just not true. I thought about Tuesday night before, during and after the race – how could I not? I have long had a theory that there are so many disgusting things about Donald Trump that you can actually learn a little about a person by what bothers them most about him. Is it racism? Misogyny? The fire hose of lies? Strongman tendencies? General madness? When I find out what upsets someone more than anything else, I feel like I know them on a little deeper level.

For a long time, what bothered me most was Trump’s ruthlessness, his total lack of shame — and the sense that he harnessed these qualities as nefarious superpowers so he could get away with anything. But in recent years, something else has risen to the top of my list: it’s the way he shut himself off, and thus so much of the nation, from the idea of ​​a collective experience, a universal truth that we can all be a part of. together. Something like the New York City Marathon, where strangers come out to cheer other strangers, where people of completely different backgrounds and viewpoints can come together and instantly feel part of something bigger, that they can lift each other up and achieve a common goal together. This is the opposite of Trumpism. What makes it possible is an openness to the world, a curiosity, a desire to improve yourself and the lives of others around you – to try to make the world and the people in it a little better.

This is the spirit of the New York Marathon. It’s the spirit of life itself, I think. And it’s something I’ve feared since Trump came down the escalator that we’re in danger of losing. The spirit felt very alive, even reborn, on Sunday, two days before the biggest election of our lives, as if it were impossible to imagine a world in which something so pure and uplifting and joyous could coexist with something at as cold and empty and ruthless as the Trump presidency. It made me feel better. It made me feel like we were all going to be okay.

Of course, I didn’t run the race in 2016, which also happened two days before an Election Day that came with many of the same anxieties as this one. I bet the runners who ran that race felt hopeful about society, just like we did at the finish line on Sunday – and yet here we all are, on the precipice, again. But I can take comfort in knowing that regardless of this or any other election, the marathon will be back next year and every year after, lifting everyone up, no matter who they are, no matter where they come from, no matter what it is. might need. My only advice to would-be runners: Lose the headphones.