November has been the month of marathon spectating! On November 1st, I cheered for my friends running the NYC Marathon, and two weeks later on November 15th I cheered for the Brooklyn Marathon. I rounded out the month by cheering for the Philadelphia Marathon after I finished the half (and got a new PR!) but I’ll recap that race after I get my official race photos.
I checked out the NYC Marathon expo two days before the race, and even got a photo of myself on the cover of Runner’s World Magazine! (I’m holding up my NYC Marathon Tiffany charm necklace from last year’s race.)
On Marathon Sunday, I met my Prospect Park Track Club teammates in Park Slope, on 4th Avenue near Union Street around Mile 7.25, to cheer for our big PPTC contingent running in the race.
We had a great view of the elites as they zoomed by! Check out these two videos of the elite women and elite men speeding past us:
Elite men at Mile 7! #tcsnycmarathon A video posted by Gabrielle Amara K (@gabrielleamarak) on
Not too long after, the crowds started arriving:
I ran last year and volunteered at a water station in 2013, so I had never devoted my day entirely to cheering. It was a lot of fun, and great weather – while it was a little warm for the runners, it was perfect for spectating.
I missed one of my non-PPTC friends because the tracking app was a little bit off, so a few of us headed up to 1st Avenue at Mile 19 to try to catch our runners uptown.
After we spotted them, we realized we could walk over to 5th Avenue to see our runners one more time! This was around Mile 23, and you could see the difference from Mile 7. Some people still looked like they had some gas in the tank, some looked tired but determined, and some were really struggling. We hoped our cheers helped!
It was a lot of fun to be able to spectate the marathon in three different spots and really made me feel like I experienced the race more than if I had just stayed in one spot.
Two weeks later, we gathered the PPTC cheer squad again to support our teammates doing the crazy Brooklyn Marathon – 9 loops of Prospect Park!
It was beautiful weather and it was a lot of fun to see the runners so many times. I can’t imagine running a marathon that was so many loops of the same park!
After training for the 2014 NYC Marathon, I didn’t want to run another marathon this fall because I wanted to have a relaxed summer without the pressure of marathon training. But spectating so many marathons, plus getting two half marathon PRs in six weeks, has definitely given me marathon fever again. I’ve been thinking about signing up for a spring marathon for a while now, and I think I’m about ready to pull the trigger and sign up.
Stay tuned…
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