“Everything I did, every move was a conversation with death,” he said. He compared these conversations to conversations he imagined had with a driver who picked him up from a party. “It’s like being left for a New Year’s Eve party. You are dropped off at six and the driver comes back at eight. It’s like ‘no, I don’t want to go’ and ‘you should be grateful that you’ve been here for two hours and have a great time’ and finally ‘you can try to pick me up but I’m not’. going.'”
He decided to try the New York City Marathon not as a race, but necessarily as a flashback or even an inspirational story. He said he entered the race because it was a sign. It’s something he’s been looking at on the horizon for a while.
“A marathon, like any event, is no matter the distance, it’s a stamp in time and space,” he said on the phone from his home before the race. “It’s like a horizontal line on the edge of a door frame in our childhood home. It’s a sign that says, ‘I’m in this very moment and right in this space’.”
He arrived in New York for the first time a few days before the race.
“I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world on that special day that will shine with more solidarity, harmony, cooperation, strength, love and inspiration than New York City on the day of the marathon,” he said. Start. “This is magic. If there is such a thing, that’s what it looks like, that’s what it feels like.”
On Sunday, she said she was drawn to him by this magic. By the spectators who drew signs for him with phrases like “Eyes up, Rivs” and by the people who raced to walk with him throughout the day.
He measured his progress not by my mileage marks, but by what he said moved “point-to-point between these expressions of love and inspiration.”
In the last few kilometers, with Catudal joining him, he tried to focus on everything but being fully present. “This was very scary,” he said.