Think Forrest Gump with a dash of sanity.
While many Columbians passed the weekend running from ghouls and cramming to make it through the next wave of midterms, members of the Columbia University Road Runners hit the streets of New York to join a group of 43,741 in last Sunday’s New York City Marathon. They each racked up 26.2 miles from Staten Island to Tavern on the Green in Manhattan.
Many of these student runners have been training for months as a group, finding time in between classes to run around campus and in the neighborhood.
“Move to New York, start Columbia, run the New York marathon. That’s the way I have always seen it happen,” said Shehab Hamad, Business ’11, whose goal of finishing his first marathon was accomplished as he clocked a time of 4:44:00 to the finish. For Hamad, the key to success was a regimen of three weekly runs and listening to the complete Philip Glass opera on his way to Staten Island. “To help find the hypno-zone,” he said.
Though no stranger to the half marathon, first-time marathoner Kirsten Scheu, BC ’10, said that her relative-by-marriage, Joan Benoit Samuelson—who won gold in the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon in the 1984 games—inspired her to compete on Sunday.
She was also motivated by the natural camaraderie of the marathon, she said. “You’re just surrounded by thousands of people ... all of whom are just as crazy as you for waking up at some ungodly hour to run for fun. I feel like I’m part of something larger,” she added.
Like Scheu, who recalled seeing signs that read “Get out of Brooklyn” and “It’s okay to cry” by mile 24 in Central Park as some of her favorite memories of the day, many of the Columbia runners said that it was a day they would not forget.
“I think marathons bring out the best in cities and their citizens. There are very few chances to meet residents on the streets all being amazingly friendly and encouraging,” said Hui Zhen Lum, SEAS ’10, after running his sixth marathon at a personal best of 5:13:57 on Sunday.
“The New York City Marathon seems like one of those experiences like going to the Statue of Liberty or the top of the Empire State Building—just something that you have to do with your brief time in the city,” said Jay Shuttleworth, a student at Teachers College, who said he ran ten marathons before his first NYC marathon this year.
Three of the CU road runners—Damion DiGrazia, GS ’10, Lindsay Jacobson, Business ’11, and Justin Mann, Law ’11, qualified for the Boston Marathon in April with times of 3:08:00, 3:32:49 and 3:08:17, respectively.
DiGrazia said he plans to run in Boston, though he is an ultra-marathoner who prefers races anywhere from 53 to 72 miles, and who hopes to one day run 100-mile races.
This year, Jacobson beat her previous NYC ’08 marathon mark of 3:43:18—which was just 2.5 minutes shy of qualifying—by 10 minutes to earn her spot in Boston this coming April.
Mann said he came to the start with a training that built to a maximum of 50-plus miles per week to qualify in his first-ever marathon.
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