Laurent's brother decided he wanted to run. He asked his Dad if he wanted to run it again, he had run in New York 20 years ago in 1989. Then his Dad asked if we wanted to run. All and all we said yes, not knowing in what state we would be in at the end of our triathlon season. So here Laurent and I are, in New York City after both our great seasons, 6th and 3rd in the World in 2009. We just had a small break and restarted running 2 weeks ago. Our stay is for 9 nights with the France Marathon Club package. I am registered to run as: Andréa Hewitt - France.
We arrived 5 days before the 1st November event. And we didn't just sit in our hotel room waiting, like we would normally do for a big race.
The first day, we spent all day shopping, we walked from 19th st to 56th street up 5th Avenue. We also swam at the Bally's gym pool, ran in central park and the other days we ran on the treadmill at our hotel's gym.
New York's Time Square where we saw Mamma Mia on Broadway.
I was race number 17385 which put me in the middle of the green section of the first wave starting at 9.40am. I was pretty close up front, because after the starting gun it only took us 1 minute to run over the start line, we ran straight onto the Verrazano bridge off Staten Island.
I prefer to call it a long run rather than a race because the pace I was going was not my normal race pace. The longest training run I do is 2 1/2 hrs, so to run almost 4hrs was a struggle. I ran alongside Laurent's Dad, not worrying about my pace and not thinking about my time. I finished in 14 thousand and somethingth place out of the 45000 or so competitors. (3hrs 57min 51sec)
The crowds were huge. There were singers, cheer squads and even a whole orchestra at one stage which gave the race an awesome atmosphere. One thing that surprised me was that the course was not flat at all. There was either a slight up or downhill throughout the entire course which got pretty steep over the Queensboro bridge. My final 6 miles were very slow. I walked a bit and met randomly people to talk to. I had a silver fern drawn on my face, so I received some kiwi support which took me through to the end!
Looking back to New York City from Liberty Island with Laurent(left) and his brother Arnaud.
