{"id":10288,"date":"2026-09-18T14:32:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/velomag.eu\/running-through-shadows-nyc-marathon-and-the-vanishing-winter\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T14:32:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:32:56","slug":"running-through-shadows-nyc-marathon-and-the-vanishing-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/velomag.eu\/nl\/running-through-shadows-nyc-marathon-and-the-vanishing-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"Running Through Shadows: NYC Marathon and the Vanishing Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 9\/11 Running Ritual, the NYC Marathon, and Disappearing Winters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Five years ago, a 9\/11 anniversary run transformed into a marathon habit. Now, as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches and the 50th New York City Marathon looms, I reflect on the autumn that never came.<\/p>\n

On September 11, 2021, I found myself near the East Broadway subway stop in Chinatown, nursing a Gatorade and tending to a blister from a 13-mile run\u2014the longest I’d ever attempted. That day, I entertained the thought: maybe I could run a marathon<\/em>. It was the 20th anniversary of 9\/11, and the miles provided the space to process. Little did I know, it was the beginning of a new passion. Two years later, I completed my first marathon\u2014the New York City Marathon\u2014and have since made it a tradition to run every September 11th. This year, on the 25th anniversary, I did it again. In six weeks, I’ll run the NYC Marathon once more.<\/p>\n

I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and never left. Three months in, I started my first job at a magazine, cutting through Washington Square Park each morning, feeling the invincibility of being 22 and employed in the greatest city on earth. That morning, on my way out of my SoHo apartment, I forgot something and went back upstairs. My sister called from New Jersey and told me to turn on the TV. I did, and then I went up to my roof.<\/p>\n

What I remember most about that fall isn’t the ash or the flyers or lining up to donate blood. It’s that for about six weeks, something real and almost unrecognizable took hold\u2014a version of the country that seemed to have agreed, briefly, on what mattered. And then, slowly over twenty-five years, that version of the country slipped away.<\/p>\n

I walked a lot that fall. SoHo to the Upper West Side and back, more than once, up to the bar near Columbia where, a few months earlier, in a summer publishing course at the journalism school, I’d discovered gin and tonics. It was too easy to be outside. Too warm. That November was the warmest New York had ever recorded: no real cold, no snow, no cider-and-scarves reset. I wanted it badly, more than I ever had\u2014the brisk morning that makes you put your hands in your pockets, the first flurries that make the city go quiet for an hour. It never came.<\/p>\n

I thought about that non-winter again on this year’s run, listening to NPR’s Michel Martin interview John Avlon, who was Rudy Giuliani’s chief speechwriter back when Giuliani was the mayor everyone (temporarily) agreed to like. Avlon’s point was a fair one: The real lesson of 9\/11 isn’t the unity itself, it’s that we squandered it\u2014and that we shouldn’t need a catastrophe to find our way back to each other. He was right about that. What he didn’t say was what, exactly, we\u2019re supposed to unite around. Twenty-five years on, I don’t think that’s much of a mystery. I think it’s the weather.<\/p>\n

The warm fall of 2001 was a kind of preview\u2014of the floods in Nepal taking towns that had stood for centuries. Of the heat domes parked over cities with no infrastructure for a hundred and ten degrees, because they never used to need any. Of the summer New York’s sky turned the color of a traffic cone because a forest a thousand miles away was on fire. This is, in a pretty literal sense, the whole premise of this publication: that there’s a natural world worth going outside for, and that it’s supposed to be dependable, and forever. Both of those things are now, like everything else, up for debate. If Avlon is right that we need something bigger than ourselves to rally around, the climate has been making its case since long before that November. That’s just when it started making its case to me.<\/p>\n

This year’s anniversary run is in the books. The real one is still ahead: on November 1st, five boroughs, 26 miles. I’ll check the ten-day forecast obsessively. I already know better than to bet on a cold snap. But I’m bringing the throwaway sweatshirt anyway. <\/p>\n

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A 9\/11 Running Ritual, the NYC Marathon, and Disappearing Winters Five years ago, a 9\/11…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t