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1 THE CHASE IS ON
As I stood there on that unusually warm November morning, looking all around me, everything seemed to say New York.
I was a row or so back from the starting line of the 2005 New York City Marathon, with the Manhattan skyline, shrouded in a dank, soupy fog, rising off in the distance beyond New York Harbor. Nearby, my teammates, 150 or so New York City firefighters, were doing their final stretches and giving each other one last command: Beat the cops, okay, beat the NYPD. Any second, Frank Sinatra would be blaring over the loudspeakers, so that every last one of the 37,597 runners about to take off from Staten Island via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for a 26.2-mile race through the city's four other boroughs could hear--what else?--"New York, New York."
Like I said, everything seemed to say New York.
But all I could think about was Boston.
Boston? What had gotten into me? I was a New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, with the accent to prove it. When I used to have hair, I combed it like Tony Manero, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever; my sisters, Eileen and Maureen, called me John Revolting. Now I lived in midtown Manhattan, where I was a firefighter with Ladder Company 43 in East Harlem, and on this marathon day, to remember all my fellow firefighters who died on September 11, 2001, I had stenciled "343" on my left arm. I also owned three bars in Manhattan, and if needed I could tell you where to go for the best Manhattan clam chowder, Brooklyn lager, or New York strip in the city. I had nothing against Boston--in fact, I was a huge Bill Buckner fan, and I'd have a beer with Denis Leary any day of the week. But New York was my town.
Still, at that moment I couldn't get that other city out of my mind.
"Hey, Matty? Matty? How you feeling?"
"Shane, I'm good, bro. I'm good. How about you?"
"I'm ready. Just keep the pace, Matty, keep the pace."
To me it sounded like Shane McKeon, a training partner and another firefighter on the starting line, was saying, "Keep the faith." In a way, he was. He was reminding me to stay steady. Keep the pace. If I could click off 26.2 miles at a pace of about seven minutes and 15 seconds per mile, that would get me to the finish line in Central Park in three hours and 10 minutes. And that would easily beat my best-ever marathon time by nearly 40 minutes. And, if everything went right, that would give me a shot at finishing among the top 10 firefighters running on this day, which would help us in our annual race-within-a-race against the police department.And best of all, that would win me a prized spot in next year's Boston Marathon.
And that's why I had Beantown on the brain. I wanted to run the most famous race of all. Boston.
They've been staging the Boston Marathon every April since 1897, and for most of those years only a select crowd gets to take part. To earn an official race entry, you need to nail a pretty demanding time based on your age. So, at 39, I had to run a 3:15 marathon. Boston race officials allow a 59-second grace period, but not a second more. I didn't want to chance a close call, so a few weeks earlier I told Shane that I would go out a bit faster--I'd aim for a 3:10 finish, giving myself a five-minute cushion.
Whatever it took to make it to Boston, I was game.
Still, even with my plan in place I knew there were no guarantees when it came to a race like a marathon. The day's weather could trip you up, and today's temperatures were expected to rise to the mid-60s, scorching for late fall. I also worried that I might feel flat after so many weeks of intense training; I had been running upwards of 50 miles a week since May. And then there was the fact that I was still relatively new to the competitive running scene. Just two years ago I was a firefighter with a sore back and a triple chin; without really noticing, I had packed an extra 35 £ds on my five-foot-ten frame. I was up to 212 £ds, and behind my aching back friends were calling me Beer Belly Matty and Fatty Long. But then I found religion--or I should say running, as well as biking and swimming. In other words, I found the world of triathlons.
Egged on by my friend Noel Flynn, I trained through the winter of 2004 for my first triathlon--a 1.5-kilometer swim, 40-kilometer bike, and 10- kilometer run--that spring. When I completed it, I couldn't wait for the next one. And the one after that. I got addicted to the competition and the training and the camaraderie among the athletes I met at different events. I joined a triathlon club. I tracked my mile-split times and my heart rate after every workout. I logged the number of miles I put on my running shoes, retiring a pair when it hit 300. I consumed nutrition books. I started preaching that bagels are not your friends at family parties. I cut back on my beer intake--a huge concession for a guy who owns bars. And I started racing every chance I could. In 2004, my first full year of training, I did 14 triathlons of different lengths, and traveled everywhere from Long Island to New Jersey to Texas to do them. The adrenaline rush from the training and the competing was like nothing I had ever experienced- -except maybe the rush of running to a fire with my ladder company. And all the work paid off in other ways as well: I dropped to 175 £ds, and the backache disappeared for good. Suddenly, I was in the best shape of my life.
Then I made the ultimate commitment: I signed up for an Ironman, an event that can make waste of even the best athlete over the course of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run. It was in Lake Placid, New York, in July 2005, four months before the New York City Marathon. My training buddies thought I was nuts. "Matty, what's the rush?" Frank Carino, a close friend and fellow firefighter, asked one day after we did a long, hard training run together. Frank had attempted his first Ironman only after competing in smaller ones for five years. "The Ironman can take a huge toll on your body. You can build up slowly, you know."
"Frank, I know, but the thing is, I love this stuff--even when it hurts."
No, there was no talking me out of it. On July 26 I did my first Ironman, finishing in 11 hours and 18 minutes, and in 279th place out of about 2,000 finishers. I did the marathon leg--the third and final one--in three hours and 44 minutes, nearly nine minutes faster than my last solo marathon seven years earlier. A pretty good showing, I thought. "Pretty good?" Frank said after we were done. "That was fantastic. Matty, you've got to slow down, you're catching up to me. You're definitely going to Kona someday."
He was talking about Kona, Hawaii, site of the annual Ironman World Championship. Frank had qualified for the first time with his race in Lake Placid. For me, Kona would be a goal come 2006. First, I had to make it to Boston.
I looked at my watch: 10:09 a.m. One minute until the cannon blast to start the marathon. Just then, John McLaughlin, an FDNY lieutenant who once ran this race in well under three hours, shouted to me.
"Hey, Matt, what are you looking to do today?"
"Three-ten, John," I shouted back.
"Three-ten. Sounds good to me. Why don't you run with me?"
Huh? He wasn't part of my marathon game plan. I had run hundreds of miles with Noel and Shane and Frank over the past few months. But none with John McLaughlin. Besides, he was faster than me; he could throw me off pace. "Hey, thanks, John, but just go ahead. Enjoy."
"Come on, Matt. Come out with me; we'll do it together."
"Thanks, bro, but I'm planning on running the first two miles kind of slow, maybe at 7:45 pace. That way I won't die later."
"What? How are you going to run 3:10 doing that? You're crazy."
Just then, BOOM! The race was on, and John was gone.
Every year on Marathon Sunday, the television crews covering the race show an overhead shot of the Verrazano-Narrows as the mass of runners crosses the two-mile span into Brooklyn. From that vantage point, the runners look like a collection of colorful bugs, inching their way toward some unknown spot. But when you're actually on the bridge, among so many people, it feels more like you're part of an oversize rugby scrum--with bodies bumping, elbows bashing, shoulders colliding, and feet tripping over feet and more feet. It can also seem like one massive, slow-moving, no-end-in- sight traffic jam. The weird thing? You don't hear many runners complaining. And why should they? They're running the New York City Marathon, the biggest race in the world, and perhaps the biggest block party, too. They know that once they make it over the bridge and into Brooklyn, a line of spectators will stretch--virtually unbroken--for the next 24 miles, whooping them on until the finish line in Central Park. For sheer spontaneous citywide enthusiasm, nothing beats Marathon Day in New York. Nothing.
Once I made it over the bridge and had a little more running room, I pushed myself to get on my planned pace. I made my way up Fourth Avenue and through the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. My mom and dad still lived in this neighborhood after raising nine kids--yes, we were one big Irish Catholic family. The day before, Mom had said she and Dad would be out cheering for me, so I told her I would look for them, but I warned her: There would be no time for a family reunion this morning.
At around mile three I met up with Jason Brezler, a young probationary officer I knew from the FDNY training academy. Since March, I had been on temporary leave from my firehouse in East Harlem and detailed to the academy's physical fitness unit. Everyone in the FDNY refers to the academy as the Rock, maybe because it's on 22 run-of-the-mill acres of Randall's Island, the strip of land on the East River that most New Yorkers pay little attention to. It's also where probies like Brezler go for six months of basic training in the ways of becoming a firefighter. They learn everything from how to haul fire hoses up a dozen flights of stairs to crawling through narrow, smoky tunnels while breathing in purified air through a mask. And they learn how to save lives, including their own.
Since the first day of probie school, Brezler had stood out as a hardworking, levelheaded kid. He told me at one point that he was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and had been stationed with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan before signing up with the FDNY. Now he was running his first New York City Marathon.
"How you feeling, Brezler?"
"Good, sir. How are you doing, sir?"
"So far, so good. Three miles down, right?"
"Yes, sir."
For the better part of the next seven miles, through the heart of Brooklyn, Jason and I ran together, not saying much, just settling into a zone. And keeping to our pace.
It was at the Rock that I first started training with Shane and two other firefighters who worked in the fitness unit, Tommy Grimshaw and Larry Parker. Three or four days a week we would meet at 6 a.m., two hours before the probies arrived, and get our workouts in. We were a foursome for the decades. I covered the thirties while Shane, at 28, had the twenties. He was an anomaly as a runner: a hulking six-foot-six, 230-£d former college baseball player who could bang out mile repeats at six minutes a pop. He was hoping to break the three-hour mark in the marathon for the first time. Larry, 42, was known throughout the FDNY as the Fireman Ironman. He had competed in triathlons for years and ran his own training camp for aspiring Ironmen. He regularly finished the marathon among the top five firefighters. And then there was Tommy. At maybe five foot six, with sandy brown hair and darting eyes, Tommy, 55, looked more like a high school English teacher than a firefighter. But he was as tough as his raspy Queens accent. He had run nearly every New York City Marathon since 1978 and had finished each one in four hours or better.
Back in the summer, we pledged that we would each qualify for Boston--and then we trained together to make sure we all did. Some days the four of us ran long, some days we ran hard, and some days we did both. On Monday, for instance, we might do 12 miles, with eight of them at a six-minute, 15- second clip. On Tuesday, an easy eight-miler. Friday was the killer: an 18- or 19-mile long run during which Shane or Larry would "drop the hammer" at certain intervals; they'd take a seven-minute-per-mile pace and jam it to 6:30 for a mile or two.
For the first few weeks, whenever Shane dropped the hammer, I would fall behind him by several hundred yards, catching up only when he slowed down. But as we came to the final month of marathon training, the gap had lessened--and Shane noticed. "Matt, you're pushing it, my man," he said after one run. "I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of our top 10 guys on marathon day. You've come a long way in a short time, bro."
As Jason and I made our way through Brooklyn, and with the heat rising, I knew I would not be dropping any hammer on the kid today. Instead, at the end of each mile, I made a point to check in on him. "Jason, that mile was a little too fast." "Jason, that one was a little too slow." "Jason, don't worry about that guy passing us; let him go. You're doing fine." But just before finishing mile 10, when we were in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section, Jason no longer looked himself.
"Matt, it's my stomach," he said. "I'm jumping out for a few minutes."
"Anything I can do for you, Brez?"
"No, no. I'll catch up to you."
"Okay, I'll be on the right side of the road the whole way. Look for me--or I'll look for you at the finish."
I had 16 miles to go, and I was surrounded by hundreds of runners, but I saw no one I knew. Not Shane or Larry or Tommy. Not even John McLaughlin. Now I was on my own.
