New York City Marathon Part 3
This is my third and last post on the 2007 NYC Marathon.
Finally, the men started to arrive. Just like with the women, they were preceded by motorcycles and a truck bearing the time, in this case 1hour 24 minutes and 50 seconds. The women had reached this point at 1 hour 32 minutes and 16 seconds into their run.
In the end, the fastest woman (Radcliffe) took 2:23:09 to finish the race and the fastest man (Martin Lel of Ethiopia) took 2:09:04.
Lel is the runner in the blue shirt directly behind the motorcycle windshield.
And the male runners started coming on quickly. The fastest few men weren’t as dominant as the fastest women.
You could almost see the crowds starting to grow by the minute once the men came. It seems that the crowds were more interested in seeing the quantity of runners rather than the quality of the best. That’s probably not a fair characterization, but it was on my mind because it seemed that the crowd grew so quickly after the first groups had passed.
One of the runners is apparently named “Deacon”. I can’t read the other.
During this short period, this wheelchair racer came by. Talk about a tired person! This guy was obviously exhausted, but kept going.
And there were still women runners coming by. But at this point in the race, the running crowd just started to swell and so did the viewers.
The picture below is the crowd right behind me shortly before I left.
A lot of the runners started making signals of some sort: waving, raising hands, high-fiving the crowd, and so on. They never said anything. Not a word that I heard. I can’t blame them; in this run, talking is way too difficult after 17 miles and a lot further to go.
I really didn’t want to stand there for several more hours, so I decided to leave and walk southward along the route just to see the crowd and what else was going on.
In the 15 or so blocks I walked, the crowd was thick and all craning their necks. Or taking a shortcut to watch.
At one point, I found myself taking a high spot, too.
There were a couple of bands playing along the route. That was very nice and folksy. But I was tired and had seen all that I really wanted to see.
-H
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