November 6: The New York Marathon

The 26-plus-mile New York Marathon will be run today in all five boroughs of the city, with more than 45,000 participants, of whom more than 25,000 will cross the finish line. There they will see a statue of Fred Lebow (Ephraim Fischel Lebowitz), a Romanian-born Jew who finished 45th out of 55 in the first New York Marathon, in 1970. That race, organized by Lebow and Vincent Chiappetta, had 127 participants and was confined to Central Park. It was Lebow who brought it to the city’s streets and bridges and built it up into the largest marathon in the world. Lebow ran 69 marathons in 30 countries and was president of the New York Road Runners Club for twenty years. In early 1990, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and two years later, he ran his first five-borough marathon in celebration of his 60th birthday.

“In running, it doesn’t matter whether you come in first, in the middle of the pack, or last. You can say, ‘I have finished.’ There is a lot of satisfaction in that.” —Fred Lebow