Race Report

New York City Marathon

Sunday, November 4, 2001

When I decided to make the trek down to New York to cheer on the marathoners I never realized what I was in store for. I arrived in NYC on Saturday afternoon in time to attend Daniel's encounter at a real nice Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was a great time and the food was wonderful. GREAT JOB DANIEL. I met so many people that I knew only from the list and it was great putting faces to all the names I knew.

On Sunday Milt Link, Julia Kim, Glenn Gabriel, and I got on a subway and headed to the 3-½ mile point. From there we saw the leaders who looked great as they always do and we proceeded to cheer all runners. Julia was giving us constant reports on where Ron's group and I finally figured out why Julia has so much time to E-mail. She has a portable pocket E-mailer. :o).. This was my first opportunity to cheer with Glenn. This guy is amazing and I don't know how he doesn't get hoarse. He is a constant barrage of encouragement to each and every runner, who has a name, or country, or some other designation on their person. At this location there was a band playing patriotic music and with the constant stream of runners representing all different nations it was an extremely emotional experience. After all penguins ran through we headed up to mile 8.

We saw Ellen from Brooklyn and Peggy Harper both who I first knew from my time on the Team Penguin list. It was great meeting both of them. We cheered on runners with them and then moved on up to mile 18. At mile 18, Julia got an email from Ken Weissman who informed her that they were only a block away and we spent time with Ellen and Ken doing more cheering.

Milt and I left to try to find Cheryl Link at mile 23, which we did and she looked great, and looked like she was having a blast. I then headed off to home extremely tired, but having had a wonderful satisfying experience.

Email comments to Ken at kenspidey@prodigy.net