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I initially did the New York City Marathon in 1977. I had trained for merely 7 months. I decided to go with a 1/2 marathon for my first race. I chose the Westchester Half in May. My cotton gym shorts showed me the reason why they produce running shorts out of nylon. The cotton had become soaked with sweat, grew to be very heavy, and practically fell off. After that, I obtained a number of nylon shorts. Princeton, NJ, was the location of my second road race run in September. Running the 1st of five times, I did the the NYC Marathon on October 23, 1977. The experience was extraordinary. Beginning on Staten Island, it runs into Brooklyn over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Queen's "We Are The Champions" was blaring from road side audio speakers in "Bed-Stuy" in Brooklyn. You cannot get lost or off-course due to the fact that the complete racecourse has a blue line colored down the middle of the road. All the runners fully understand the race rule "follow the blue line". Running from Brooklyn, via Queens, across the 59th Street Bridge, the race moves into Manhattan. Once in Manhattan, it turns north up 1st Avenue, thru the Upper East Side, by Harlem, and across the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx. I ran nearly all of the race with another runner that I began talking to while still in Brooklyn. We were each running our 1st marathon. Chatting and kidding about his everyday life in Baltimore, he kept us both equally preoccupied and not nervous about the race. We even ran backwards for a short distance as a distraction. We would compute our pace in our heads as we passed just about every mile post. What we really needed was a modern GPS enabled watch like the Garmin Forerunner 410, which could have provided us all the data we wished for at the touch of a finger. After a brief time in the Bronx, the race comes back to Manhattan and goes south through Harlem, again. Moving thru Harlem, past Marcus Garvey Park, the race runs south on 5th Avenue. It was along there that I commenced having cramps in my right calf and said to my friend Gavin to go on without me; I had to stop to stretch out my calf. After stretching out, I began running again. 3 hours and 18 minutes was my overall time for my very first marathon. Doing the marathon was a terrific thrill for me. One of the race sponsors, Perrier, was offering free bottles of their product to the athletes. I reckoned it was the best thing I had ever tasted. I had never enjoyed it before. Two or three days subsequent to the race, I got a phone call from Gavin. He was going through the post marathon blues. While I had read about such a thing, I, personally, was anything but down in the dumps. I was pleased at my accomplishment. If are looking for additional material on this product and related topics, come stop by my blog at http://best-gpswatch.com/garmin-forerunner-410 and you will see it there. Just head to my website: http://www.best-GPSwatch.com and you should get all you need.
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