Every year, the New York City Marathon is the largest marathon in the world.
So many people want to run the race that there is a lottery that excludes over half of the applications 5 or 6 months before the first runner even crosses the starting line! The race travels through the 5 boroughs of New York City.
I'd like to share some of my experiences from the race to help you know what to expect when you run it.
Your experiences will be unique and your own, but this should help you discover the race and know what to look for.
Here are my experiences for the second third of the course as we ran out of Brooklyn and into Queens and Manhattan.
Mile 9: 6:24 / 59:17 Mile 10: 6:24 / 1:05:41 There were a few good crowds, a lot of crowds that just kind of apathetically watched us run, and there were quite a few good bands that were playing throughout Brooklyn.
Mile 10 was effortless.
We just wanted to keep the pace for a bit.
I did miss clicking my watch, but these miles were definitely even paced.
Mile 11: 6:42 / 1:12:23 At mile 11, we slowed it up a little.
Our goal pace was 6:50 or so, so we did not want to be going out too fast.
Mile 12: 6:19 / 1:18:43 When I was in college, we used to sing on our long runs.
The people around us did not seem to appreciate my rendition of the House of the Rising Sun, though.
Probably because anybody at our level of fitness was ahead of us and couldn't hear us, and the people around us were struggling to keep pace while we were just moseying along.
We also got to see a man cheering on fellow Mexicans in his 6 foot sombrero as he ran back and forth along the side of the course.
Mile 13: 6:35 / 1:25:18 We got a man in a bright yellow singlet in our sites at around the halfway point.
We chased him for most of the race until the later miles.
He got a slightly larger lead on us in the low 20s, and I was unable to reel him back in at the end.
Another half of a mile and I probably would have had him, but at least he gave us some motivation as we ran.
Mile 14: 6:37 / 1:31:55 Mile 15: 6:37 / 1:38:32 The halfway point came as we were crossing the bridge into Queens.
Queens was over pretty quickly, and I missed clicking my watch at the end of mile 14 because I was busy grabbing some water and taking a gel packet, so the 6:37s are an average pace for the two miles.
I would tend to think that they were pretty even, though.
Mile 16: 6:49 / 1:45:21 The Queensboro Bridge.
You run along the lower level of the bridge, and with the sunglasses on it was very difficult to see around you on the portion where the sides are blocked off.
You can see the people running ahead of you where light filters in, but where it was dark we amused ourselves by making ghost and bumper noises.
They echoed nicely.
I could not see the reactions of anybody around us, so I don't know how well they were received.
Crossing the bridge had a nice little upslope, but we were right around the pace we wanted.
Mile 17: 6:15 / 1:51:36 At the start of this mile, I turned to John and said, "That was good; let's try to keep that pace.
" Then we got to the end of the Queensboro Bridge and could start to hear the crowd at the other end.
Between the decline in the road and the fantastic crowd over the next mile, I led us a little too quickly.
It was a lot of fun, though.
Coming into Manhattan was the first time during the marathon that there was both a huge crowd and an enthusiastic one in the same place.