I have a superstition that any statement about running a race is followed by ‘all being well’. I’m superstitious about catching a last minute cold or picking up a late injury so until I’m on that start line, I can’t be sure I’m running that race. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve said to people this year, when they asked me what I was training for, ‘the New York marathon on November 4th, all being well’.
This time I didn’t make the start line. This time all was not well. But it wasn’t those pesky London Transport germs or that freak last minute injury – it was a hurricane that stopped me in my tracks, blew away 18 weeks and 100s of miles of training. Or maybe, more accurately, it was the response to that hurricane.
To be honest, I was amazed they even said it would take place at all. We were luckily booked onto one of the first flights to land in JFK from London following the reopening of the airports and had a hitch free journey to New York. We didn’t even have to wait long for a taxi at the airport, despite the lack of subway or train alternatives. There was a well organised system in place, and the city seemed to be coping. We did note the patchwork power outages, at one point driving down the Van Wyck from the airport to our Brooklyn hotel, there was power on our right hand side, but none on our left. But in the neighbourhood we were stayed, there was no indication there had been so much as a storm, let alone a hurricane, unless you wanted to get a subway (which you couldn’t).
The immigration officer that checked me through was delighted that the marathon was supposedly going ahead, he seemed really proud of the fact (while ribbing me that I might have to swim to the start). Other Brooklyn locals we spoke to seemed to not think that there was anything strange about it taking place at all. The posters were up on route to support the runners for Sunday. Everything went on as normal.
But when you watched TV, you saw it wasn’t normal. Huge areas of Queens and Long Island were without power and flooded. I spoke to one local whose grandmother had escaped to the roof to avoid the flooding in her Queens home, and whose mother had lost all her possessions but was delighted to be alive. Red Hook in Brooklyn also suffered massive flooding and power loss. But it was Staten Island -the suburb which is the starting point for the marathon - that was generating the controversy and, finally, the anger towards the marathon and its runners.
From what I hear, race organisers New York Road Runners didn’t think it would go ahead either, but when reviews showed that the course was clear and that their resources could cover transport to the start, the Mayor was adamant it should proceed. The race registration opened as normal, I picked up my race number on the Thursday before the race, and spent some dollars on my race souvenirs at the expo. I started to focus again on the race itself, even working out how I would get to my bus without access to the subway, all those practical pre-race things. But on Twitter and on the news, there was disappointment and then fury at the decision to proceed. I never came across anyone in Brooklyn who was anti-marathon, but there was plenty of anti-marathon feeling to go round.
It reached the point that it became the race’s fault that many of the people on Staten Island were without power, not Sandy, not the power companies, not FEMA. It was New York Road Runners’ two generators in Central Park that seemed to be the final straw – it was (quite rightly) deemed that these would be more useful on Staten Island (or hey, even Red Hook or the Rockaways, but they are not on the marathon route so were momentarily forgotten as disaster areas). All that water etc. that runners would use, that should also go to the hardest hit. And so the groundswell of public opinion moved firmly against the marathon. There was no choice left but to cancel it, at a stage so late that virtually every competitor had arrived in the city, still needing to take up a hotel room because they couldn’t change their flight even if they wanted to (remember, there was rebooking backlog). I firmly believe it was the right decision, but I don’t believe it was made at the right time.
Obviously I’m disappointed that I did not get to run my race. With three PBs in September, I was in great form, but now I won’t know how that would translate to an autumn marathon. I may never be in that form again either. But all marathoners are psyched for last minute hitches or disappointments. So that is not what really upset me.
What disturbed me most is how people became distracted from the real failings in the hurricane response, and focused all the blame on a race that hadn’t even taken place. No one seemed to be angry about the fact that there seemed to be no real urgency on getting the power back up in the suburbs (or even that the power companies themselves, who happily take these people’s dollars for utility bills, couldn’t rustle up some more emergency generators to get them some heat on a cold autumn night). No one seemed to care that the Mayor was not leaning more heavily on ConEd and other companies who could have perhaps supplied generators. This seemed insane to me. The only generators that existed in the world at this point were the two in Central Park, hired by NYRR from a private company. Those generators symbolised the have and have nots of the city. New York Road Runners were being unfairly vilified as the villains of the piece, yet all they could do is say which company they had rented the generators from and ask FEMA to rent them instead.
So when they cancelled the race, fine. There are more important things in life than running. Many that could access transport went out and volunteered on race day instead, which was a wonderful gesture. But I never did find out if anyone hired those two generators for Staten Island and delivered them there. I’m guessing not. I do know that when I walked through Central Park on Monday afternoon near the marathon finish, there were hundreds of boxes of apples stacked in rows, all destined for the runners’ finish bags, that had not made it to Staten Island. They probably all went rotten and had to be disposed of.
And people are still without power in NYC. People’s homes are still wrecked. People are still without the means to heat their homes and cook a hot meal. Some of them don’t even know when they will get full power back on.
So who won? New York Road Runners, with their no refund policy? New York City, who still got the economy boost from visitors who had come to the city for the race anyway? Maybe, but it certainly wasn’t the residents of Staten Island, Red Hook and the Rockaways who are still surrounded by their destroyed homes and possessions. People need to remember their anger from November 1 and 2 and focus that again on the powers that be. Nothing has been improved by the race cancellation. Except maybe Bloomberg’s poll ratings.
