26.2

Last week you couldn’t hear this number enough. This city has been crazy about the marathon for over a month now. The last few weeks have reach a kind of fevered pitch. Bleachers and support structures and barricades have been going up in the park since before Halloween. It’s hard not to get excited. Even Lance Armstrong was running it this year.

Cara and I went over to Williamsburg in Brooklyn to watch at the ten-mile point, a place where we’d have a pretty good chance to see the elite runners and then the mass of regular people from all over the world who have come here just to run this thing. It started out with just a trickle, wheelchairs, elite woman with bodies that looked like sinew with skin stretched over, then elite men, and then the hoard. It just kept coming and coming. Like an entire town was arriving. People had their names on their shirts so you could give them shout outs, and Cara and I brought signs to cheer people on. I screamed myself hoarse. Even saw Armstrong with a camera crew filming his efforts, and a pace group of former elites there to pace him. It was a trip. I just wanted to get away to the gym and swim after that. Being a spectator always makes me want to participate, so I think I’m going to train for a marathon next year and see if my knee explodes.