What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon

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 constructing a perfect playlist for it. This was a meticulous, almost scientific process. For the first few miles, I queued up some chill live sets from the War on Drugs. For the straightaways of Brooklyn: Big Thief. For the grueling inclines of the Queensboro Bridge: a turn to metal, with some propulsive Iron Maiden, Screaming Females, and the Sword. I timed my mix to end with the Detroit Cobras’ “Feel Good,” a song that makes me smile and jump around every time I hear it — even, I theorized, after running for four hours. It would have been a great playlist, if I’d ever gotten the chance to hear it.

A few feet from the marathon’s starting line, there’s a box set up for runners to donate clothing they’ve been wearing to keep warm as they wait for the race to begin. I had on an old beaten-up hoodie I’d brought specifically to discard for this purpose. As we all approached the line, with runners beginning to hop up and down with nervous anticipation, I removed my sweatshirt and tossed it in the box. I then took out my phone, loaded up my Spotify, and realized … I’d just thrown out my headphones with the hoodie. The perfect playlist was all 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 the steps of his own feet and the ever-increasing gasps and heaves of his own breath.

And it turned out to be the best part of the whole experience. The New York City Marathon is not something to be filtered through one’s apps and siloed into algorithmic personalizations. It is best experienced with open ears, open eyes, and, yeah, I’ll say it: an open heart. To be among the people of New York for four hours is to be carried by them, and I’d have missed so much of it if I’d been enveloped by indie rock and death metal the whole time. To run the marathon is to be transformed, to learn things about yourself and the world around you that you couldn’t know beforehand. And to do it on the eve of an election that we’ve all, justifiably, spent weeks, months, years gnawing down our fingernails awaiting was therapeutic in all the right ways (and some of the wrong ones).

It’s like nothing I’ve experienced before or anticipate experiencing again. Here, the things you learn about yourself, and the world, running the NYC Marathon.

New York City handles logistics like no other city.

A total of 55,646 human beings finished the NYC Marathon this year, the highest number in the race’s history 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 of the participants do not frequent. They clear a 26.2-mile path and make sure none of the runners die along the way. And they have to make sure the city itself keeps humming along while more than a million people line the streets to scream and drink and party all day. I’ve covered Super Bowls and World Series and Olympic Games, and I’ve never seen anything even close to as chaotic as the New York City Marathon. The city pulled it off like it was the easiest thing in the world, and did so 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 high-fiving strangers? I now have! New York will manage to do this seamlessly again next year and every year. It’s incredible. And apparently the city doesn’t even need a mayor to do it.

Being cheered on by strangers makes you feel better about humanity and yourself.

I lived in New York City for 14 years. On marathon days, I would usually roll out of bed, cigarettes and vodka-heavy screwdriver in hand, and cheer incoherently for people I did not know to run faster. I did this mostly for me, to make myself feel useful, to feel like I was part of something that I would never have considered participating in myself. Now that I’m a runner (and considerably healthier) and have been on the other side of that rope, I sort of want to hug old me for his support. When you come out to cheer people on, it legitimately makes a difference to them. I think it might have saved me in this race.

Buoyed 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 as if I were floating above the ground, as if the crowd were carrying me along through the air. It turns out it wasn’t — it was my legs that were doing that, and my legs were mad at me for it: At around the mile-19 mark, out of nowhere, I suddenly began to suffer severe leg cramps. It felt as though every step I took landed my foot on a two-foot-tall iron pole sticking out of the ground. I instantly pulled over to the side of the road, sat down, and began massaging my calves and thighs furiously, just trying to get them to work again. (See if you can tell where on the graph this happened.)

I stood back up, leaned over the railing, and tried to stretch out my screaming calves, terrified I’d gone all this way and done all this work just to fall short in the final stretch. Then I noticed a group of young people making eye contact with me. I was in as serious of pain as I’d ever been in my life, and I’m sure I looked it. But they did not behold me with pity or concern — they just screamed, almost in unison, “You got this, man!” And you know what? It really helped. Their enthusiasm didn’t loosen up my cramping muscles, but it pushed me to keep going anyway, to reward their unalloyed, wholly sincere excitement — to make their effort as worth it as mine. Much has been written about the joyous lovefest 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 elemental: human beings supporting other human beings, simply because they are other human beings. I could barely walk for the last two miles of the race. But after that, there was no way I wasn’t gonna finish that fucker. And I did.

So get out there and cheer everybody on every year. You may already be drunk by 11 a.m. That’s okay. You’re still helping. You’re still doing more than you could possibly know.

The outside world doesn’t intrude that much.

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

1) Having a physical activity through which to channel one’s political anxieties would be useful.

2) There would be reminders of the election everywhere along the route.

I was extremely correct on the first one but only slightly so on the second one. I did see my fair share of “Harris Walz” camo hats (apparently everyone’s arrived in the past week) — and a lot of “Run Like You’re Going to the Polls” signs. But all told, the crowd seemed to take the race as more of a respite from the election than I did. The only real political moment was one of my own making. Approaching Williamsburg, I was running down the left side of the street and saw an older man with a “Make America Great Again” hat, the only one I spotted the entire race. I instinctively made eye contact with him and saw him lean forward slightly as I approached, as if he was relieved, after being scowled at all day, to see a white man in his late 40s coming toward him. I smiled and yelled a cartoonish “Boooo!” at him; everyone around him laughed, and he smiled too. It was a nice little jovial moment for all involved, and I’m still not entirely sure why.

When the race is over, everyone else who ran it is your new best friend.

After the long zombie shuffle down Central Park West with my fellow haunted finishers, all wearing disaster blankets as though we’d just survived multiple car crashes, I returned to my hotel to meet with my family and stuff my face with carbohydrates and alcohol. In the lobby, there were several other marathoners, and we gravitated toward one another like magnets. This happened the rest of the night and into the days after: Any time you saw someone wearing a medal (and we were all wearing our medals the whole time), you pointed at them, and they pointed at you, and two of you just 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 part of it, and everyone ends up mingling with everyone else. Late in the evening, as I dragged myself, post-nightcap, back to my hotel, I saw two people wearing their medals while eating with their families and friends outside a Greek restaurant. One was speaking French; the other, wearing a Pakistani team jacket I saw several times during the race, was speaking Urdu. They both saw me and my medal, stopped what they were saying, and waved. I waved back as if I’d come across a long-lost friend. Which, I guess, I had.

People are good. (Right?)

As much as I would like to say I ran through my election nerves, that simply is not true. I thought about Tuesday night before, during, and after the race — how could I not? I’ve long had a theory that there are so many loathsome things about Donald Trump that you can actually learn a bit about a person by what bothers them most about him. Is it the racism? The misogyny? The fire hose of lies? The strongman tendencies? The general boorishness? When I discover what upsets someone more than anything else, I feel like I know them on a slightly deeper level.

For a long time, what bothered me most was Trump’s relentlessness, his total lack of shame — and the sense that he had harnessed these qualities as nefarious superpowers so that 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 has closed off himself, and thus so much of the nation, from the idea of a collective experience, some universal truth we can all be part of together. Something like the New York City Marathon, where strangers come out to cheer other strangers, where people with entirely different backgrounds and viewpoints can unite and instantly feel like they’re part of a larger whole, that they can lift one another up and accomplish a common goal together. That is the opposite of Trumpism. What makes it possible is an openness to the world, a curiosity, a willingness to improve yourself and the lives of others around you — to try to make the world, and the people in it, a bit better.

That’s 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 that escalator, that we are in danger of losing. The spirit felt very much alive, even resurgent, on Sunday, two days before the biggest election of our lifetime, as if it were impossible to imagine a world in which something so pure and uplifting and joyous could coexist with something as cold and empty and pitiless as a Trump presidency. It made me feel better. It made me feel like we’re all going to be okay.

Of course, I didn’t run the race in 2016, which also took place two days before an Election Day that came with a lot of the same anxieties as this one. I bet the runners who ran that race felt hopeful about society, the same way I did at the finish line on Sunday — and yet here we all are, on the precipice, again. But I can take solace in knowing that, regardless of this or any other election, the marathon will return 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 they might need. My only piece of advice for future runners: Lose the headphones.