Famous Ankles

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

I’ve already covered the wheelchair portion of the race.  However, you must understand that once the runners started coming, that didn’t mean the wheelchair racers weren’t around.  In fact, they kept popping up here and there for as long as I watched the race.

As we ended the last post:  the first runners were on their way.  The initial heralds were motorcycles.  And then this car with the time at the 17 mile mark (1 hour 32 minutes).

Then the runners themselves.

From what I understand, these two are old competitors and started and ended the race pretty much like this.

Their names are Paula Radcliffe, from Britain, and Gette Wami, from Ethiopia.  You’d think the taller one (Radcliffe) would have the advantage, but it appears marginal.  They apparently ran neck and neck up until almost the very end, where Radcliffe pulled ahead.

It took a couple of more minutes before the next runners came up.

And then they started coming in earnest.

Some seem to have name tags in addition to the number.  This is “Moeller”, I’d guess.

And then “Begay”.

And then “Eap”.

And they just kept coming.

The next was a favorite of mine.  I call her the “bouncing hair woman”.  It was just flying all over the place.  She moved smoothly but her hair was in another dimension.

And then, 23 minutes after the women first started by…the men started to arrive.

But that’s the subject of another post.

-H

On Sunday, I went to my third, and last, of the weekend races.  The Olympic trials and the International Fun Run both had participants; but the Marathon is a lot bigger than them.  A lot bigger.  I’m told that 38,000 runners were expected.  It’s amazing and interesting that so many want to endure such pain, but more power to them, I guess.

The Marathon itself covers all five NYC boroughs (Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx).  It actually hits Manhattan twice.  First, the runners start in Staten Island and cross the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn.  They run through there to Queens and cross into Manhattan on the 59th Street Bridge.  They then run up 1st Avenue and cross into the Bronx.  It’s just a short jaunt through the Bronx and then back to Manhattan where they run through Central Park to the finish.

I decided to watch the first Manhattan portion of the run, so I went to the Upper East Side and did a little wandering well before the start.  I emerged onto 1st Avenue at about 88th Street and decided to grab some breakfast.  Strangely, I didn’t find a place I wanted to eat as I walked along 1st until I reached the low-80s and grabbed a bagel.  As I emerged with my bagel, I saw the first of the racers.  Not a runner:  a racer.

I was aware that the first of the Marathoners were wheelchair racers, but this guy (and the subsequent racers) were amazing.  The guy zipped by like a shot.   

Then, I went looking for a good place to stand.  As I went, I saw several more of them.  Three minutes after the first…

You can see the bicycle escort.  Virtually all of the leaders in the different groups had escorts, but the wheelchair racers had them more often.  It was probably a lot more fun for the bike riders to accompany them rather than the runners.  I mean, these guys were going pretty fast.

One minute after the second racer came a small group.

There were a bunch of these racers that passed by over time.  Even if I wanted to post all of their pictures, some of them were moving so fast that all I got were blurs.

I passed by one of the water stations and then settled down just south of one of them.  I was between 77th Street and 78th Street.  This was at about the 17 mile mark of the marathon.

You’ll note that there was very little crowd for the first racers.  I have to hand it to those who were there early.  The racers certainly heard a lot of encouragement.  But of all the cheering crowds, nobody matched the people manning the Poland Water station.

Some more racers.

Below’s a real blurry one, but I like the posture.

You can see the style of the wheelchair above is different.  He’s got a hand-cranked bike format called a “handcycle”.  As I understand it, they are considered different classes of racers and even had different start times.

Just amazing stuff.  These people were really pushing themselves.  The place I was in was at the bottom of a long hill and right before a long uphill portion.  Some of the racers were coming in in a state of near exhaustion.  The woman in the next two pictures was “hitting the wall” so to speak as she came up to the area across from me.  Her escorts, at least at this point, were running behind her.

She then just totally stopped for a period of about six minutes.  You could tell we were all rooting for her to continue.  The crowd at this point was just starting to grow.  (My side of the street was a lot more crowded than the other side.)

Do you see the crowd looking southward in the picture above?  They’re looking at the first of the runners who were approaching.

But that’s the subject of another post.

-H