With less than a week to go before 50,000 runners from across the globe descend on the five boroughs for the 53rd New York City Marathon, New Yorkers are gearing up for the big day.
The race, one of the largest of its kind in the world, is set to take place on Sunday, Nov. 3, and as much as it’s a day for the runners, it’s also a day for the tens of thousands of spectators who line the streets cheering on the athletes.
Rob Simmelkjaer, the CEO of the New York Road Runners — which organizes the marathon — joined the “Mornings On 1” team Monday to preview the event and dish out helpful advice for first-timers, including where he thinks the best spot is to take in the race.
“There are a lot of great places,” Simmelkjaer said. “I think all through Brooklyn you can find a lot of good places.”
“For those who are rooting on a runner who want to see them multiple times, my favorite, personally, is, go to upper First Avenue, where you can see the runner going up into the Bronx, and then turn back around and catch them coming back down Fifth Avenue through Harlem,” he said.
It's around the time where runners begin hitting “the wall” of fatigue, and generally could do with a boost of support, he noted.
Asked about the New York Road Runners’ decision to ban cyclists from the marathon course prior to the race, Simmelkjaer said the pre-dawn ride was “becoming something that was unsafe for the people who were setting up for the marathon that morning.”
“When you have thousands of cyclists flying through at high speeds, we had incidents where some of our volunteers were being put in harm’s way, so we had to do something to keep everybody safe as we set up for the marathon,” he said.