...the New York City Marathon was born. This year's race, which had been scheduled for November 1st in the race's now-traditional "first Sunday in November" place on the calendar, was one of the countless events cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Weep not for the Marathon. Earlier this week, Mayor DeBlasio announced that Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will not be held this year in its traditional format.
There was a terrific piece in Sunday's The New York Times that George A. Hirsch, Chairman of the New York Road Runners, wrote honoring the memory of the 1970 Marathon. Gun time was 11:00 a.m. on a sticky September Sunday. The race took place entirely within Central Park and included four full loops of the Park. Several years ago, I participated in the inaugural Central Park Marathon, hosted by New York Runs, which was held on a Sunday morning in February over a course that honored the original New York City Marathon course but was modified so that we did not have to deal with the Harlem Hills. In its adulterated form, on a cold but comfortable February Sunday, the course was hard.
I was fortunate to run the Marathon three consecutive times, from 2015 to 2017. Each of those three years, I was among one of approximately 50,000 finishers. In 1970, only one hundred and twenty-seven runners toed the starting line. Fewer than half of them, fifty-five, crossed the finish line. Only one woman entered the race, Nina Kuscsik. In the 1970 Boston Marathon, five months earlier, she had finished in 3 hours, 12 minutes. But leading up to the New York City Marathon, she was battling the flu. She was unable to finish, dropping out at the fourteen-mile mark. In 1972, she won Boston and New York City, the latter of which she won again in 1973.
The 1970 champion, Gary Muhrcke, a thirty-year-old FDNY firefighter, who almost slept in instead of running the race that Sunday morning. His shift the night before had been particularly busy and he had spent it responding to calls and battling blazes near his firehouse in Far Rockaway. He and his wife had three small children and Mr. Muhrcke called his wife from the firehouse at his shift's end to tell her that he was very tired and really did not feel like driving into Manhattan to run a marathon on what turned out to be an 85 degree, humid day. However, according to Mr. Muhrcke, "I heard a disappointment in her voice, because we had three little children. So I said alright we'll go, pick me up, we'll go."
What was his bounty for winning the first-ever New York City Marathon? "I got a trophy and a watch. The trophy is broken. The watch, I don't know where it is."
Next year, presuming COVID-19 has not morphed into COVID-21 (we know it will not be COVID-1, do we not Mrs. Conway?) the 50th New York City Marathon will take place on November 7, 2021. This past Sunday, to mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the very first Marathon, Mr. Muhrcke threw on his running gear and ran one lap of the original Central Park course. His grandson, Colin Kern, kept him company. Mr. Muhrcke completed the jaunt in 58:21, which was just over a nine-minute-per-mile pace.
He is eighty years old.
-AK
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