Nathan Schiller

Last week, Let’s Get Uncomfortable, the running podcast I host with Inés Bebea and Jaime Chien, posted its twenty-fifth episode, the first of season two. 

Mitchell Silver: People’s Commissioner

Our season one finale featured Mitchell Silver, who recently finished a seven-year tenure as New York City Parks Commissioner. Parks make all cities habitable, but they transcend ones like New York. There is a reason that birds love Central Park: cruising into a vertical sprawl of glass and concrete, those 843 acres are paradise.

People love it too; more than 25 million visit every year, for the birds and trees and lawns, the bridges and roads, the bandshells and playgrounds, the zoo and the ice rink. Central Park is, indeed, a manmade place, created long after the surrounding natural forest was taken from indigenous people and built up by settlers. 

Such atrocities are not solely historical. New York City’s parks are, today, distributed along typical wretched lines of American race and class. Mitchell Silver chose to make his job about improving park access and equity, and he told us all about it. 

The Boogie Down Bronx Runners showcase their borough

A runner’s love for parks is an undercurrent of our first episode of season two, featuring Lenny Grullon, Chris Guzman, and Jean-Paul Fontana of the Boogie Down Bronx Runners. Their group converts the running curious into the running obsessed. They’re about community and enthusiasm, about showcasing the Bronx as a runner’s borough, a place where a bunch of mostly Black and Latino runners running through it is—in their words—normal. 

The image of a burning Bronx elides the fact that this vibrant borough, which birthed hip hop and houses the Yankees, is relatively beautifully green. Van Cortlandt, bordered by six neighborhoods in the northwest corner of the Bronx, is by far the most well-known Bronx running park, and not without good cause. Where else do you find a historic cross-country course tucked into a hilly network of tracks and trails? 

Five miles to the east is the stunning Pelham Bay Park, and from there you can zig-zag down the borough to hit a dozen more gems. That’s kind of how the Boogie Down Bronx Runners do it, and I’ll be doing my own version here. Next year I’m debuting my “Parks of the Bronx” photo essay series, in the mold of last year’s “You’ll never believe this is Manhattan” diptych on my backyard parks, Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill. 

The New York City Marathon turns 50

On our show, the Boogie Down Bronx Runners discuss their raucous cheering section at mile 20 of the New York City Marathon. The race returned this year, after a pandemic hiatus, for its 50th anniversary. 

It’s a wonderful event. For a long time, I lived at the 10K mark and then mile four. Every marathon Sunday, I cooked a pancake feast while dashing out to watch the elite women, then the elite men, then the stampede of regular runners. Every element, from the pros gracefully gliding down vehicle lanes at the forty-yard dash pace of normal people to the triumph of personal goals and bucket lists, is a marvel. Novice or world-class, one conquers twenty-six miles with supreme dedication. Who cannot appreciate that? The energy is infectious.

The New York City Marathon’s insecurity is that it boasts a five-borough course only nominally. You start in Staten Island because by immediately leaving it, via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, you get enthralling views of the Manhattan skyline, in whose shadows you’ll later finish, and a goosebumps peek at the snaking route through Brooklyn. 

(That the course runs through or adjacent to the hippest and most affluent Brooklyn neighborhoods is not a point made entirely in good faith, since the borough is a monstrosity that’s home to other running races that do travel through the more modest and marginalized and colorful and immigrant neighborhoods, but it’s definitely not one not worth mentioning.) 

After nearly a half-marathon in Brooklyn, you enter Queens only because it’s the only practical path to the noise corridor of Manhattan’s First Avenue. Then it’s north to the Bronx, where you return to Manhattan as quickly as possible. 

Running a marathon is expensive, and so is hosting one

If it sounds uncouth to note that the course, at 85 percent a Manhattan-Brooklyn thing, dips nearly exclusively in America’s financial and cultural wells, it is less so to state that major marathons—like the six actual World Marathon Majors (Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, New York) and the dozens of races in the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon Series—are major moneymakers. 

The New York City Marathon entry fee ranges from $255 for New York Road Runner members (NYRR annual membership costs $40 for an adult) to $295 for other U.S. residents to $358 for non-U.S. residents. There are other ways in, but they require disproportionately difficult labor, whether that’s charity fundraising or the type of nonprofitwork that can, in one admirable example, cover the fees of seven runners of 33,000. 

Also, you can’t just pay to enter. You first need to win a lottery, or complete prequalifying races, like NYRR’s 9+1 Program. This contingency plan costs around $500 in cumulative fees and is logistically difficult for people who do not work weekday daytime hours or do not live in or near Manhattan. 

Races charge exorbitant fees (and court corporate sponsorships) because they need cash for insurance, security, staff, merchandise, marketing, technology, transit, catering, and more. Putting on a marathon is expensive, but the local economy can benefit. Popular marathons are tourist attractions. Runners need to eat and sleep and travel around town, and their friends and families make spectating partying. Many marathons (though not New York) also expand their customer base by including other race distances and configurations, from marathon relays to half-marathons to 5Ks and 10Ks and fun runs for kids.

Training for a marathon is expensive, and takes a lot of time

But every dollar boosting a small business is a dollar out of a person’s pocket. And if a runner will spend, let’s say, $1,000 on New York City Marathon weekend (fees plus $200 for a night of lodging and however much more in train/plane/bus tickets or gas/toll/parking and subway/bus/taxi transit and bar/restaurant food), they’ve spent at least that much in the prior year. 

To train for a marathon at minimal risk of injury (and sanity), an ordinary runner needs at least one pair of modern running shoes (roughly $120), a small selection of weather-dependent technical clothing ($150), and hundreds of extra calories per week: gels and bars and powders during activity, nutrient-rich carbohydrate-heavy meals for pre-long-run energy and protein-rich ones for post-run recovery. 

Marathon trainees also need time, lots of it. Two hours per day is a baseline average. First of all, even easy three-mile runs are deceptive time sucks: 30 minutes of activity, plus 15-minutes prep and recovery, including outfit changing and showering. 

But it’s the long runs that are critical to marathon training. The longer the distance, the more energy required, mental and emotional as well as physical. You need a safe route, you need to carry food and drink, you need an exit strategy if you bonk or get hurt. You need to know whether you prefer camaraderie or isolation, group running or soloing, and whether your preference is practical. Then you need to get through the actual run, and then you need to recover. 

All this means that a 20 miler, the hallmark of long training runs, is rarely just a three- or four-hour commitment. It’s an entire Sunday, if not an entire weekend. During this time, you are, generally speaking, restricted in your material ability to generate income, care for a child, connect with family and friends. 

After years of experience, years of tinkering with your training, optimizing your body’s limitations, discovering local races and supportive apps and run groups, you can minimize the costs. But all the while you’ve been maximizing injury risk. 

There’s a reason there are more than seven thousand articles about running injuries on the National Library of Medicine website. Most runners will, at some point, get injured. Injuries are painful, aggravating, irritating, and profoundly disheartening. They are also costly. Medical consultations, scans, and therapies drain hours and accounts, and are fraught with the anxiety of no guarantee of recovery.

Let’s Get Uncomfortable interrogates issues of access in running 

None of this is to say that marathons are bad or should not happen. But the economics of modern marathons are exclusionary by design. They make it clear who has the resources to participate, and who has to fight for them. To mention this is to stay in the spirit of the Let’s Get Uncomfortable running podcast.