They Also Serve, Who Only Stand....
About the time a set of twins comes across the line together with a mutual toss of pony-tails, and a finisher celebrates with a full somersault, and another doffs a shirt reading My Second Marathon on the front and I Am Single on the back, and not long after one runner goes through the halfway mark wearing about an eight-foot wooden lighthouse (Larry the Lighthouse, official mascot, running for charity) and another is lifted from just past the finish line into a wheelchair, cramping too badly to get back on his feet, I am reminded that runners in any race miss a lot of the action.
Spending most of the race pounding pavement, looking at the backsides and scything elbows and flicking soles ahead, they miss, for one thing, the sight of the field's faces and form as they cross under the time clock and into food lines and recovery and medal-earning history. Runners also are barely aware of the joys and agonies of the many who serve while also standing and waiting (or sometimes running and shouting): the race directors, water stop and mile-marker volunteers, traffic cops, first aid staff, food and drink handlers, timers and, of course, the sometimes threadbare, sometimes surging lines of family and friends, who must deal with hope and uncertainty and what to do, for instance, with the baby or the dog.
This race is the New Jersey Marathon (and Long Branch Half-Marathon), being run on this Sunday morning, May 4, on a long, shallow loop skirting the Atlantic shore and on parallel course through neighborhoods two or three blocks west. The 13.1 mile loop is being run once by 5,000-some half-marathoners and twice by about 3,500 attempting the full magilla, and my marathoning friend, Dan Galioto, from Parsippany and the Herald News has just glided past, smiling and waving, through the first loop.
Even on a gray day, the start-finish line here has a festive feel. Rich Mahoney, an Irishman from County Kerry now living in Virginia Beach, VA and a blithe spirit, is calling the race, encouraging the runners, exhorting the crowd, "Let's hear it for the marathon runners going by. They have 13 miles to go!" He and his late wife, Nancy, were runners, themselves, and the winner's trophy carries her name.
Spectators shout other names, other encouragement: "Danielle! GO Danielle!" "YO, Ralph! Ralph!" "Hey, ALS guys, wooo-HOOO!" They mutter, too, to each other and on cell phones, "Damn! What's wrong with my camera?" "What happened to her? Is she OUT there?".
Different conditioning, different preparations, different lives, different results. Some seem spent at the half-marathon finish; a few of the marathoners look ready to run another. Most appear grateful to cross the finish mat, soaking up their times from electronic Champion Chips tied to their laces. Mahoney calls, "Congratulations to Katie Kelly on finishing her first half-marathon, and her last!"
The day's most grueling experience might well belong to the traffic cop at the intersection of Joline (Route 36) and Ocean Drive. The drive, main route along the waterfront, has been closed to traffic, and the officer, a pleasant-faced, beleaguered woman in her 30s, faces one motorist after another, explaining that they CAN'T go south and pointing them back to a workable route. She takes their sometimes volatile reactions in stride, but long after most runners have finished she will still be out there, after six hours on her feet, trying to untangle traffic.
Spectators, of course, can view but not share the running experience. They miss the runner's outer struggle and inner dramas, the interweave of body, brain, logic and emotion, often hammered and squeezed into distress in the late-going, sometimes batted about like a bag of balloons by the course, the weather, the messages sent by muscle and sinew and memory.
I am wondering what struggle my friend, Dan, will face in the final miles, and whether he will reach the finisher's clock before it clicks to 3:10.00, three hours 10 minutes flat, his urgent goal, the qualifying time for Boston. He has trained with astounding discipline, speed and interval work, longer tempo runs, 20-mile runs over hills, through a sometimes wet and icy winter, in traffic, on hard asphalt. Marathon are really run, and won, in training, and he has paid the price, put the mileage in the bank.
Still, I can also think of my own experiences, of the bleakness that can hit at 17 or 18 miles when the body might run out of its most convenient fuel and start burning its own muscle, of the heavy legs and aching shoulders and burning lungs and the general distress that seems to narrow the vision into a tightening tunnel. I would rather remember the happiest races, feeling strong nearly all the way through, letting the body and its rhythms take over as if it's a machine and I am just a passenger. The alchemy of any given race can be strange and complex. No two runners feel quite the same.
They come singly, at first, Gerardo Avila of Fort Monmouth through in 1:11:36 to win the half marathon, Kristen Haughey of Pittstown still moving easily to win the women's race in 1:26:57, Oz Pearlman of New York City coming through the marathon in 2:33:06, more than three minutes ahead of the field. Faces, outfits, gaits, finishing gestures, each runner's are different. A few check watches. Some sprint and almost dance through. Some stagger to a stop. Several shout, "YEAH!" and "HOOOOOO!" and "Oh-mi-GOD!"
Danny is out there, now, and he misses the variegated crowds shifting along the surf-line, and the staff's worries over running out of water, and the frantic and finally futile search for a finishing tape for the woman's marathon winner, Kathryn Bowser of Thorndale, PA, who glides through unannounced in 3:04:51. I picture him coming in on Ocean Avenue, crossing the bridge over Lake Takanassee, knowing every inch of the course, trying to discern but not dwell on the distance still ahead, to read the patterns of ocean-front high rises, to focus on form and keep his thoughts from clamping and muscles from cramping.
FInishers start to mass, now, most of them from the half marathon, and most supporters approach them, hug, then drop politely back, realizing that recovery can be its own modest and uncertain ordeal. Finish line photographers keep shooting, my own camera's battery dies (no juice left for Dan's finish), and I look, now, at the clock clicking away, 3:07, 3:08, 3:09....
I remember how desperate I was, at one point, to finish under three hours, and remember turning a corner around a big ore tanker in Duluth, Minnesota, Grandma's Marathon, and seeing the distant clock still reading 2:59-something, and watching it, in agony, no sprint left, as it clicked to 3:00.
Dan will see that sub-three, one day. And he'll see Boston, too. Today, I see him, finally, with the clock at 3:11, his face grim and tight with effort, and disappointment joins the pain. I want to tell him what I learned, over the years, when a finish like Duluth's cut into the joy and satisfaction, but that won't console him. The goal drove him, and he'll find, I know, better days and have his own -- on the hills of Newton and Heartbreak on the way to his finish in Boston.
Today, we pat his shoulder and make admiring noises, and then his girlfriend, Karen, tells him with excitement that he has finished 58th overall among some 1,699 recorded finishers (Sanjay Shah of Bensalem, PA is recorded last in 7:12:53) and many others who dropped out. He has recovered enough, by then, to smile.
