Man Who Has Never Run Farther Than the Mailbox Files 26.2-Mile Marathon Recap

NEW YORK — Sheila Chepkirui won the women’s race at the New York City Marathon on Sunday, out-dueling a field thick with past champions over the final miles, and Andreas Almgren won the men’s race in the first marathon he has ever run. This reporter watched both finishes from a folding chair, and can tell you with 31 years of authority that neither of them has ever had to cover the 1997 regional semifinal, so let’s all keep some perspective.

Let me explain what I am looking at here. A marathon is 26.2 miles. I have measured the distance from my recliner to the refrigerator at approximately forty feet, round trip, and I will be honest with you, by the third lap of that I am winded. So when I tell you that Chepkirui and Almgren covered 26.2 miles, I want you to understand I am not disputing the number. I am disputing whether it was necessary.

Chepkirui, the defending champion, spent the back half of the race trading the lead with a group of women who have all won major marathons before, which is the kind of mutual respect you simply do not see in the concession line at a high school football game. At some point one of them decides to go, and she went, and the others did not go with her, and that was the race. There was no holding, no late-whistle nonsense, no official named Reginald Fuhrman putting his thumb on it the way Reginald Fuhrman did to us in the fall of 1997. She just ran away from everyone. Clean. I respect it, and I am furious about it.

Almgren is where it gets personal. This Swede had never run a marathon in his life, showed up in New York, and won it. In my day you had to lose a marathon two or three times before anyone let you win one. You paid your dues. You ran it in the rain, you ran it after your coach quit on you, you ran it with a bad hamstring and a worse attitude, and only then, maybe, the city gave you the tape. Almgren walked in cold off the track and took the whole thing on the first try, and I want every young reader to know that this is not how it is supposed to work, and that the stadium knows what it did.

Now. The nachos.

I have been to the finish-line area of several marathons in a professional capacity, and I regret to report that the food situation ranks dead last in my current power rankings, below even the Tuesday nachos at the county rec center, which are themselves under formal review. The marathon serves its athletes a banana and a foil blanket. A banana. These people run for two hours and change and the city hands them fruit and tinfoil. At a Friday night game they would get a walking taco in a bag and they would earn it in forty-eight minutes, not two hours, and I think that tells you something about priorities that I am not going to spell out further.

For the record, the elite athletes did not hold, did not travel, did not step out of bounds, and did not at any point argue a call, which made the event very difficult to cover using any of my usual notes. I watched a man win a marathon on his first attempt and a woman out-kick four former champions and at no point was there a referee to blame, and I will tell you, as a professional, I did not care for that part at all.

They ran well, they ran clean, and I have never been angrier.