The New York City Marathon.

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

My cousin has won a lottery place in the NYC Marathon for this coming November. She’s psyched, and I want to be the best cousin I can.

Anyone familiar with the proceedures involved in going from various point to various point along a route, the care, feeding and watering of a marathonner and how this best can be done at this particular Marathon. I’ve got months to plan this out, and want to do the best by her that I can.

  1. Are there traditional Meet Sites along the course, mile marks where most runners will be expecting liquid or solid fuel?

  2. Can anyone just meet up with runners along the way to assist them, or do I need to arrange to be allowed to do so in advance?

  3. Have any Dopers met runners at the finish line, and if so what have your brought to them? I’ve shot the Start and Finish of the NYC Marathon twice but franky wasn’t concerned with what support people were carrying or delivering to runners.

Any advice or help with this one will be greatly appreciated. This may sound like a G.Q. thread but frankly I’m not interested in posting an O.P. in there only to be told that there isn’t a specific Question and have it locked down after some free-form cursing by the person locking it down.

I figured I could ask the questions pertinent to my O.P. here and perhaps get both hard data and anecdotal thoughtful advice from runners and friends of runners. I just wanna make sure I’ve done everything I can to insure that this Marathon is the best one she’s ever run, and is run with the best support team possible.

Cartooniverse

#2

Bump.

Nobody runs around here?? -disappointed glance-

#3

I used to run, but I only ran cross-country and track up to a middling standard, though one of my friends who used to run with was the junior cross-country champion of England and ran quite a few marathons.

From what I know liquid should be provided by the organisers at stands along the route. When your running your not going to want to eat anything.

#4

Other than East Harlem and the South Bronx, the entire route is packed with spectators. It would be very difficult to hand off anything to anyone. Plus, there is plenty of food & drink provided by the organizers.

It would also be difficult to see someone at more than one place, unless you want to try the subway to go from spot to spot, since all of the streets are closed off and you couldn’t drive or cab to each location.

Forget meeting someone on the finish line; that is reserved for VIPs and is cordoned off, and they make the runners walk up from Tavern on the Green to about 86th Street before they can exit the park (walking 30 blocks after having run 26 really sux).

#5

you could try working at one of the rest stops. I’ve vounentered at mile 13(right before the bridge that goes from booklyn into queens) when I was in high school. Depending on the neighbourhood (like at mile 13) people come out to help out, this one family sets up this giant boom box and play the theme form rocky and charriots of fire ALL DAMN DAY!!! It’s cool when you are running by and only here it for 5 to 10 minutes tops. But after 4 hours you want to kill someone :smack:

#6

Well this is a week after the Race, how did your cousin do CartoonVerse?

#7

The after the raceop.