NYC’s Marathon Turns the UWS into a Vision in Autumn Orange

By Lily Seltz

The early November foliage wasn’t the only thing giving the Upper West Side an orange glow on Sunday. Each of the nearly 60,000 runners who sprinted, struggled, or strolled down the final stretch of the TCS New York City Marathon in Central Park were rewarded with a bright orange space blanket. By midday, Lincoln Center was awash with runners wrapped in orange as brilliant as the autumn leaves.  

The finish line is at the park’s West Drive near West 67th Street. Once they were done, marathoners could ring a bell outside the Runna popup hub at Broadway and West 62nd Street. Some splurged on pedicabs to drive them away from the Upper West Side hubbub. Others, like Yvonne Cassidy, 51, recharged at Starbucks. An Upper West Sider for 14 years (she recently moved across town), Cassidy ran Sunday’s marathon for an ovarian cancer charity in honor of her friend Louisa, a marathoner and triathlete who died two years ago. Cassidy’s plans to run the 2024 marathon were derailed by a stress fracture in her femur, which left her on crutches until February of this year. 

Cassidy recovered and ran this year’s marathon in five hours and twelve seconds. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. To celebrate, she thought about getting a tattoo of her bib number and time, but decided her body had been through “probably enough pain.” She would celebrate instead with dinner out. Or: “I’ll probably just get the medal engraved or something instead,” Cassidy said. “I can do the tattoo anytime. It doesn’t need to happen tomorrow.” 

Other racers took advantage of the warm-ish weather to buy pretzels, hot dogs, or ice cream after they finished. Street closures at West 77th Street. forced Ibrahim, an ice cream truck attendant, to park further north at West 86th St and Central Park West. While he’d been ticketed twice before for parking in that same location, Ibrahim said the risk was worth it for the good marathon-day sales. 

Near that same West 86th Street spot, Upper West Sider Ella Lim was wrangling two nieces, a large cardstock sign, a foam finger, and a megaphone (there had been a balloon, too, but that got ditched along the way). It was the end of a long day of marathon spectating, and Lim had come to support her sister, who had flown in from the Philippines to run the fourth of the six marathon “majors” (she already had Tokyo, London, and Berlin under her belt; now, only Boston and Chicago remain). 

Lim herself has run three marathons, including in New York City in 2019. While an injury forced her to retire from marathon running after the Berlin race last year, she’s embraced the role of “official cheerleader.” She planned yesterday’s race day carefully, targeting viewing spots with thinner crowds (she started at mile 17, at 1st Avenue and East 89th Street, and then crossed over to 5th Avenue and East 102nd Street). 

Of the major marathons, the New York course is the most difficult, but it has “the best crowd,” said Lim. “It’s a party in the street. Everybody wants you to finish…You don’t feel alone.” 

Lim said one appeal of marathons is their democratic quality. “The medal that the elite athletes get is the same medal as yours. The course they go through is the same course as yours,” she said. 

Lim owns a Nike sneaker signed by Eliud Kipchoge, the legendary endurance runner who ran his last marathon—and his first in New York City—yesterday, finishing 17th in 2:14:36. While Lim was too late to see Kipchoge run, Maluisa Ojeda, another fan and fellow marathoner, got lucky: She saw him twice, both at mile 26 and at her hotel at around four o’clock Sunday morning. 

Ojeda was visiting from Chicago, where she runs in a group with five of her friends. All of them had planned to run the NYC marathon this year, but Ojeda had to end her training after learning that what she thought was a bad case of shin splints—a common ailment among distance runners—was actually a stress fracture. 

She came for the weekend anyway, waking up early to see her friends off to the starting line on Sunday morning (she caught a few more hours of sleep after the Kipchoge sighting) and carrying two supply bags for the runners after their finish. The contents? Extra clothes and pain pills. 

To celebrate, Ojeda and her running group planned on a steak dinner and, after months of refraining from alcohol, some beer. 

Many of the spectators at mile 26 inside Central Park were there not to support a particular runner, but, as one put it, “for the vibes.” Carl and Gabby, an Upper West Side couple, came to watch with their friendly golden doodle, Arlo, and their 15-month son. “We like to cheer, because it’s such a big accomplishment,” Gabby said. “We want him to grow up loving this [kind of] thing too.” 

Noah, another Upper West Sider, had given up on Sunday brunch plans after realizing the closed streets and crowded subways would be too difficult to navigate. He brought his young daughter, Chloe, to the marathon instead. She sat on his shoulders and cheered as the first runners crossed the 26-mile mark. When two visitors from England tried to puzzle out the origin of a flag in the crowd – one of dozens lining the race’s last stretch, Noah volunteered: “I think it’s Fiji.” 

Over 150 countries are represented among the NYC marathon participants, according to the New York Road Runners. Klaudia Rucińska, 18, had made the trip from Poland. She and her friend Igor spent six weeks this summer working in Germany for Ferrero Rocher to raise the funds for airfare and the entry fee for Rucińska to run the marathon, which she finished in 3 hours and 13 minutes. Their friend Barbara Rese, a New Yorker of 35 years, is hosting them, and while she always attends the marathon, Rese said, “it’s more special this year.”

Even after most of the crowds filed out of the park in the midafternoon, race day was far from over. The final runners crossed the finish line well past 9 p.m. 

“Wear your medal out at night,” Adam, a 13-time marathoner from New Jersey, advised, “and people will buy you drinks.”

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