The most famous Marathon in the world was run yesterday: the
TCS New York City Marathon
, perhaps the Marathon par excellence, at least in the collective imagination. New York’s is a Marathon we know well on RunLovers, but which every year is able to make us feel special emotions and always give us one more reason to love this race and this city, so different from all the others and so extraordinary that it always seems about to give you a chance. Here, yesterday – even yesterday, I would say – it happened again. Not only for the winners of this edition, who, for the mere record, were Madison de Rozario and Marcel Hug for the handbikes race and Peres Jepchirchir and Albert Korir for the foot race. Indeed, the November 7, 2021 New York City Marathon had, among the approximately thirty thousand who started from the Verrazano Narrow Bridge on Staten Island, two names in particular:
Shalane Flanagan
e
Thomas Puzey
.
Shalane Flanagan, a top U.S. athlete, multiple Olympian for the U.S., winner of countless races and the 2017 edition of the Big Apple race, returned to run New York as a runner amateur, if such can be called an athlete of her caliber. retired, headlined by a feat never attempted until yesterday: running all six majors on the Abbott circuit in one year or better, since this year they all turned out to be concentrated in just six weeks, To be the first person in the world to run them in only forty-two days. The idea popped into her head because she thought she could be an inspiration to other women and to “feeling free to challenge myself, for my mental health and for my emotional sphere. For so many years I only thought about running as fast as I could. Now, however, I just want to savor the pleasure of being able to keep running.”. He then began in September to
Berlin
, running it in 2h38′, then moving on to London the following week and cross the finish line in 2h35′, fly to the United States and run the following Sunday in Chicago in 2h46′ and the next day in Boston in 2h40′, then organizing his own virtual run for the Marathon in Tokyo Portland and run it in 2h35′ and finally, as I mentioned in the opening, return to
New York
to close the loop and stop the clock at 2h33′.
A feat as a top athlete that made us all dream and led us to cheer for her. A woman who has been, on those starting and finishing lines, all the women of the world.
It is that of
Thomas Puzey
, however, the most beautiful story.
You may know him by his nickname he uses on social media ,
Tommy Rivs
.
A world-renowned ultrarunner athlete, he experienced symptoms of pneumonia in the spring of 2020 and thinking he was suffering from CoViD-19 went to the hospital for investigation. The diagnosis is a punch to the gut: Rivs suffers from a very aggressive, bilateral lung cancer, forcing him into artificial respiration via mechanical respirator in very few days. He stays in the hospital for months and loses half his weight. For the first period, because of the excruciating pains that just trying to breathe gives him, he is sedated and put in a medically induced coma, and for several weeks the possibility of a lung transplant is raised. Incredibly, however, Tommy shows signs of improvement, gradually resumes breathing on his own and is declared out of life-threatening danger, so after several months in the hospital he enters a rehabilitation center. He is not even a shadow of the great athlete who had gone for checkups a few months earlier, but he is alive and full of the will to go on, ready to drop every drop of sweat necessary to return to sharing happy moments with his family and doing what he loves most: running.
Weeks and months pass, recovery is extremely slow, and things do not seem to be going as desired, but the improvements are there, Tommy is able to walk again-though with difficulty-and he begins to think about an idea that seems absurd: running the New York City Marathon 2021, in the 50th anniversary year. Of course, he won’t run to make time, in fact, he probably won’t run at all, but he would like to try to run those forty-two thousand one hundred and ninety-five meters one more time. He immediately convinces everyone: family, sponsors, doctors.
He can do it.
So, yesterday morning, at the cannon shot that marks the start, he takes the first step. The first of tens of thousands of slow, heavy, energy-draining strides that, one after another, led him to cross the finish line in Central Park, once again, to an ovation of delirious spectators as he arrived.
A lonely man, watching him walk the streets of New York City, but with every step he has actually shared the path with all the people he loves and who love him. A man who proves to life that it is always worth living, that .
it is always right to celebrate it
.
Shalane e
Rivs
, two incredible stories, two
stories from the New York Marathon, where anything can happen
.