“If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere, it’s up to you, New York.”

THE PLAN

It all started when a close friend posted a message asking whether anyone was running the NY marathon as he’d just been lucky enough to get a ballot place for the 2023 event.
At the time of his message my plan was to have a second bite at Alpe d’Huez triathlon as my previous year’s attempt, whilst having been tremendous fun, had been hampered by an injured knee and I knew I would set a much better time if everything had been working properly.

Still, who doesn’t like a Marathon?

So, and I’m not proud of saying this, we simply bought our way into the race – plain and simple.

We’d been intending to go to New York in 2024 anyway so a year earlier wasn’t really a major issue.
Michael had got in through the ballot, which was long closed, but it turns out that if you know the right people you can get in regardless.
The right people are a delightful company called Sports Tours International but they do come with a catch. To get a guaranteed marathon entry you also have to pay for a guaranteed tour package which includes either a groovy hotel or a rather nice flight, or both.
We opted for the complete package as it also included airport transfers and an after-race party at the Hard Rock Café and other perks that made it a really logical, once in a lifetime, option.

So, and I’m not proud of saying this, we simply bought our way into the race – plain and simple.
The only thing more gross would have been to do it whilst wearing Union Jack shorts and stamping on a Stars & Stripes flag, on fire. Let’s not mention it again.

Once booked, I made a cunning plan.

Now I’ve already run many marathons, my first being back in 2018, when I was training for Ironman  Wales. However, that marathon, which I ran in Gloucester, has really been my only “proper” marathon. All marathons since then have been part of a larger event, either the marathon part of a triathlon or they have been an ultra-marathon or they have been part of Long Course Weekend over in Tenby so my 2018 Gloucester marathon remains the only marathon ran as a single event, on fresh legs, and is still my personal best time of three hours and 49 minutes.

I decided that New York was going to be my chance for a new PB. The course is undulating with a 250 metre elevation, but still flat enough to think that a PB was possible. However, to get a PB I needed to train my way back to a PB level of running fitness!

And more importantly, why was my physiotherapist not taking my calls?

Traditionally, all my marathon challenges fall apart in some way. I tend to have a mechanical body failure (Conquest of Avalon), poor hydration and cramp, (Vale Ultra, Brecon to Cardiff) or a complete footwear catastrophe. (Long Course Wales)

Jane also set herself the same goal, so the pair of us, despite being on the cycling club committee had to devote as much time as possible, during the summer, away from cycling to concentrate on distance running. So, we blew the dust off the Don Fink “how to run a marathon” book and started reading (and running, obviously).

It wasn’t an easy training; I’d been fighting a bizarre upper gastrointestinal issue since the spring resulting in an endoscopy that thankfully found nothing abnormal, at least nothing that the consultant mentioned anyway.
The symptoms eased towards the end of the summer with no true cause determined but at least the high heart rate and easy fatigue when working out seemed to finally disappear. I never got definitive answers, but we remain convinced that it had (and still has) something to do with cheese, possibly.

Six weeks before the event I strained my left calf during an interval session and had to ease back on the training. Short runs and further interval sessions seemed ok, but every long run resulted in serious calf pain and a walk home.

Two weeks out from race day however, I was on a normal evening marathon-pace session run when my calf strain hit me at just 10K.
This was now the official time to panic. I now had no idea what to do. I was just two weeks out from a marathon and I had something of a bad leg.
The question was, should I just train more gently? Should I not train at all? And more importantly, why was my physiotherapist not taking my calls?
In the end, I convinced myself that I wouldn’t get any quicker in two weeks, but I could certainly make myself a whole lot worse. I decided I would still go to New York. I would race the marathon, even if I had to walk a lot of it, and I would definitely come home with a big New York Marathon medal. It wasn’t much of a plan, but at least it was a plan.

In the meantime, I created a sub-plan of Ibuprofen, massage, icing, and anything else that I thought might possibly help.

AWAY

There is no bag drop at the start of New York Marathon. Whatever you bring to the start, you either leave there, or you run the race with. As we were leaving the hotel at 5:00am, on a chilly November morning, some additional clothes were required, and those clothes were going to be discarded at the start. Unsurprisingly, every garment in my wardrobe instantly acquired sentimental status in the days leading up to departure until finally I found a pair of gloves, a buff and a chunky sweater that I was happy to contribute to the New York needy, maybe.

One, of two huge Rolls Royce engines.

As I settled into my comfortable Virgin Atlantic A330 seat and scrolled through the entertainment package I made a sub-sub-plan with a choice of two options and an additional KT taping clause. Do I run at PB pace until the wheels fall off or do I run at a slower pace and hope they fall off nearer the end? Should I toss a coin? Unfortunately, Jane had all the coins ^[1] so that was one less joy stolen from me.

The thoughts of a PB had now gone out of the window and I didn’t even have a window seat!
I decided to let fate dictate and see how I felt on race morning – I did have to find some KT tape though.

NEW YORK

My biggest shock on arrival at JFK was a text message from EE telling me calls were now £1.54 per minute and if I wanted some data, it was £36 for 300 Mb. Feeling utterly mugged I reluctantly bought some data. ^[2]
The marathon starts on Staten Island at 8.00am from Fort Wadsworth at the south western end of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge. As the bridge is the primary access to Staten Island and the bridge is shut for the race, all competitors have to get to the Island in time to start. Some take the ferry, but the vast majority are bussed across in advance.

We decided to stay on UK time up until the race so no sooner had we checked into our hotel we were in bed, asleep.
Saturday was race briefing and Expo Day so we walked 15km around town and picked up our race bibs and found some KT tape. Due to a catastrophe in the delivery system there we no medium, male competitor’s shirts, which understandably was an awful lot of the male entrants. Fortuitously, the organisers gathered details and promised to forward the shirts after the event.
That’s going to be rather a large postage bill for someone!
We also picked up a huge bag of carbs for the morning as no-one was offering a breakfast quite that early. Despite it being the city that never sleeps it is also the city of “don’t wake me too early”.

DAWN

My instructions for transit to the start said to take the 5.30am bus from outside the public library, the same public library in fact where Peter Parker gets dropped off by his long-suffering uncle, who, a few hours later is gunned by down by the wrestling match taking’s thief. Taking the 5.30am bus has shades of parochial quaintness, however, it appears I was taking it with a least 20,000 others, all in the same queue. I had a delicious pain au chocolat to eat. From what I could see, 19,999 others didn’t and that worked just fine for me.

I had two chances of finding her in a 50,000 crowd; slim and none.

There wasn’t a 5.30am bus, there was actually an endless stream of buses, as far up 5^th Avenue as you could see, stretching into the distance, trying to fill up and depart as fast as possible. This snake of buses filled up in 6 bus lines and then moved as one in a massive stream downtown towards Staten Island in the grey dawn, each long group with its own, colourful police escort.

Queuing for a bus. Wait for ages and 50 come along at once.

As smoothly as we’d loaded, the buses disgorged their eager contents into a makeshift parking area created south of the Verrazzano Bridge.

It was chilly, not cold, but you knew it was November. I made my way to the general corral, grabbed a fresh, chewy bagel that was waved in my face, ignored the queue for the Dunkin’ hot chocolate and a free fleece hat ^[3] and then found a vacant spot on a kerb opposite a huge line of portaloos to park my behind and wait.
I passed my time by watching all the other competitors and admiring their choice of disposable clothing which seemed to vary from bathrobes, stolen last-minute from their hotel, alarming pyjamas, to absolutely no additional clothing at all – either true hardcases or they simply didn’t read the instructions.

The sun finally rose through the pier of the bridge and took the edge off the chill. It was 6.30am and all I could do now was hide in my sacrificial jumper and wait.
I screwed myself up as small as I could, pulled my jumper over my knees and down to my ankles and shivered gently whilst pondering on both my huge discomfort and huge cost of this vacation.

The sun rose, the crowds built, the toilets filled and the bridge saw it all.

It wasn’t an unpleasant wait; the temperature finally rose to acceptable and alarmingly the boom of the cannon announced the start of the race for the wheelchair runners, then the elites and finally for us common, shivering folk.
I waited to eat the last of my carbs, the pain au raisin, until 8.30 figuring that would be the right timing to avoid too much simultaneous running and digesting.

As the race had now started, Jane had to be around somewhere (she was in a later wave and on a later bus) but so many people just squashed the bandwidth and messages weren’t getting through.
I had two chances of finding her in a 50,000 crowd; slim and none. I chose none. She did likewise.
We each knew the other was there somewhere so the good luck hug had to be both virtual and imagined.

At 9.20am I discarded my faithful jumper, now sad to have chosen to discard such a beauty, and moved into my corral and waited for my very own cannon.

Having wandered around New York the day before and without any undue pain in my calf I now chose my plan which was: run for a PB and wait for the inevitable wheels to fall off. It just felt like a better plot than just run gently and slowly and get a medal.

Just as the plan was settling in my mind, a rather loud lady with a large microphone interrupted it by singing the Star-Spangled Banner.
To be fair, she did have a fine set of lungs.

RACE

BOOM!!! And we’re off.
No actually. Those ahead, near the line were off; you could see their heads bobbing up and down. We were trudging slowly to the line where the little heads were starting to bob. Weirdly the wave of heads just starting to bob was clearly moving forwards towards the start line, not backwards towards us. It was possible that we wouldn’t start running until after the start line at this rate. You could feel the group trying to actually slow down to create a breathing space to get running before the line. It was a close thing; I managed to start jogging barely three steps before the mat.
Now we were off.

So many runners, so many paper cups, a bizarre carpet of moist, waxed paper like a surreal nightclub carpet..

The first kilometre was awful. Despite starting in the 3.45 wave, we’d done the first km at 6.10 per km, well off the pace and it was so hard to overtake the mass of runners ahead. The second kilometre was still on the bridge, but the pace had improved.
We passed over John Paul Jones Park, both bridge decks full of runners, leaving me wondering why they named it after a bass player and we headed down Gowanus Expressway, up an on slip and turned into downtown Brooklyn to be met with sidewalks rammed with shouty crowds. ^[4]

Through this leg through Brooklyn my pace steadied to around 4:55 and that 6:10 first kilometre bad memory was soon wiped out.
We ran down 4^th Avenue in Brooklyn, a wide road with a central reservation, runners both sides, police and organisers in the middle, crowds either side – rather impressive.
Out of Brooklyn, just kissing Queens, and up to the Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek marked the halfway point, and my half-marathon time was 1:47.54. I was no longer cruising now though as by now there was muted pain in my calf and I’d popped two co-codamols in a vain attempt to subdue it. On the bright side I was still running, well within my PB and it was time to turn the old cap around for the home stretch.

The crowds disappeared as we crossed the Queensboro bridge to Manhattan as there was no public access. Bizarrely, there was odd bunching on the bridge and the pace dropped massively. I’m not sure, but I think it was actually other runners stopping to take pictures on a midpoint viewing area causing bunching up and congestion! Either way, it was another slow kilometre and another small hill to climb to stay near target pace.
As we came off the bridge, turned round beneath it and entered 1^st Avenue we met the crowds again; a huge wall of sound as though we’d just entered a stadium – it was pandemonium, with tickertape too.

As hydration stations were long and on both sides, first Gatorade then water, there was a dry-ish central line to start with then the merging of runners getting back to the centre of the road, with their spilling cups creating a moist, sticky avenue.
So many runners, so many paper cups, a bizarre carpet of moist, waxed paper like a surreal nightclub carpet.

At 31km I could feel the wheels starting to come off. Like one of those films where the director keeps showing a photo of a spinning wheel and we all know something bad’s going to happen, my calf was just like that. I was still at a 3:43 marathon pace and the director kept his camera on my left leg, then my face in turmoil, then back to my leg for a little too long and then, “clunk”, the wheel fell off and my left quad expired in a cloud of calf dust, small cogs, springs and misery.
I limped to a painful halt on the Willis Ave bridge into Harlem. Conveniently the crowd here was much thinner, whether it was just because it was the most northerly point or because it was Harlem I don’t know.
I had spare KT tape in my back pocket, so I crudely strapped my quad and limped on, breaking into a shuffling run as the pain eased slightly.
At 36km I had to stop and redo my strapping and attempted to stretch out my quivering quad. The race pace was now 3:47, just 2 minutes inside a PB.

I only managed another 1km down 5^th Avenue beside Central Park before I had to stop and use the rest of my KT Tape as a second strap.

Then finally, at 38.9km my right quad, sick and tired of being left doing all the work, joined the distress party and the whole ensemble cried enough. My right leg just couldn’t make up for the left’s pathetic failure.
Obviously the last 4km was then just hanging on for the end. My PB disappeared on West 59^th Street across the bottom of the park and I hobbled my way up to the finish managing an agonising attempt at jogging the last 100m just in case someone caught a rogue photograph of me at the finish line.

DONE

My Garmin ^[5] says I finished in 4:02.56 which is somehow bittersweet.
Predictably, I’m never happy.

Looking happy despite not being happy. Maybe the camera never lies?

From the start, nursing an injured calf I accepted my goal was really a medal in the New York Marathon but for so much of it I ran at a PB pace despite carrying an injury.
I knew that the wheels were going to fall off eventually but just a few more kilometres in my quads and I might never have to run a marathon again.
As it is I’ve still got at least one more to run.

Again, the bandwidth around Central Park was so compressed that I couldn’t track Jane’s progress so I jumped on the subway, changed clothes and came back to be at the finish for her later.
Unlike me, my fabulous wife smashed her PB and appears utterly content not to do another one ever again.

Jane, happy in the subway

Conveniently, our hosts had a private booking for the Hard Rock Café in Times Square so we already had plans for the evening.

The following day was Medal Monday where people wanting their medal engraved made their way back to central park. Quite obviously there were a lot of people wandering around wearing medals. However, as the week wore on there were still a lot of medals being worn up One World Trade, in Macy’s, over Brooklyn Bridge, on the subway and even on our flight home.
It was all a bit medal weird.

As usual, thanks to the IronGang for all the support, Sports Tours International for the well organised tour and Jane for keeping me reasonably sane.

[1] Interestingly, I did not touch a single coin or note on my entire trip – talk about apple pay and a kept man…

[2] Trying to navigate the subway and then using “find my wife” to track Jane through her run used all my precious data. I simply refused to be mugged twice during the same holiday.

[3] From the first kilometre the course was littered with orange and red Dunkin’ Donuts fleece hats.

[4] People used to tell me that they’d never seen crowd support like that at Ironman Tenby, and to be fair, the support in Tenby is incredible. However, it’s nothing compared to New York marathon which was 22 miles of Heartbreak Hill. Truly awesome and unforgettable.

[5] I charged my Garmin to 100% the night before the event and ran the marathon. The next morning when sightseeing I noticed it was off. It turns out it was flat. I recharged it and it stayed up above 90% for the rest of the trip. It will easily cover a full Ironman, a 4-hour activity is nothing. Why it chose to weirdly drain its battery I’ll never know.