A 9/11 Running Ritual, the NYC Marathon, and Disappearing Winters

On September 11, 2021, I sat down in front of a bodega near the East Broadway NYC subway stop in Chinatown, chugged a Gatorade, and took my right sneaker off. A half size too small, it turned out. Yep, my middle toe was bleeding through the sock. I had just run 13 miles—the longest run I had ever attempted before that morning was five. And yet, sitting there with an empty bottle in one hand and a shoe in the other, I had a thought I’d never had before: maybe I could run a marathon. Or at least a half.

It was the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I run to think and that day needed more miles than most. It was also, though I didn’t know it yet, the day I caught the racing bug: two years later I ran my first marathon, the New York City Marathon. I’ve done a long run every September 11th since. This year, on the 25th anniversary of that day, I did it again. And in six weeks I’ll be running the NYC Marathon once more.

I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and never left. Three months in, I was starting my first job out of college at a magazine, and every morning I cut through Washington Square Park to get there, feeling the unearned invincibility of being 22 and recently employed in the greatest city on earth. That morning, on my way out the door of a SoHo apartment I could barely afford, I forgot something and went back upstairs. My sister called on the landline from New Jersey and told me to turn on the TV. I did, and then I went up to my roof.

What I remember most about that fall isn’t the ash or the flyers or lining up to donate blood. It’s that for about six weeks, something real and almost unrecognizable took hold, a version of the country that seemed to have agreed, briefly, on what mattered. And then, slowly over twenty-five years, that version of the country slipped away.

I walked a lot that fall. SoHo to the Upper West Side and back, more than once, up to the bar near Columbia where, a few months earlier, in a summer publishing course at the journalism school, I’d discovered gin and tonics. It was too easy to be outside. Too warm. That November was the warmest New York had ever recorded: no real cold, no snow, no cider-and-scarves reset. I wanted it badly, more than I ever had—the brisk morning that makes you put your hands in your pockets, the first flurries that make the city go quiet for an hour. It never came.

I thought about that non-winter again on this year’s run, listening to NPR’s Michel Martin interview John Avlon, who was Rudy Giuliani’s chief speechwriter back when Giuliani was the mayor everyone (temporarily) agreed to like. Avlon’s point was a fair one: The real lesson of 9/11 isn’t the unity itself, it’s that we squandered it—and that we shouldn’t need a catastrophe to find our way back to each other. He was right about that. What he didn’t say was what, exactly, we’re supposed to unite around. Twenty-five years on, I don’t think that’s much of a mystery. I think it’s the weather.

The warm fall of 2001 was a kind of preview—of the floods in Nepal taking towns that had stood for centuries. Of the heat domes parked over cities with no infrastructure for a hundred and ten degrees, because they never used to need any. Of the summer New York’s sky turned the color of a traffic cone because a forest a thousand miles away was on fire. This is, in a pretty literal sense, the whole premise of this publication: that there’s a natural world worth going outside for, and that it’s supposed to be dependable, and forever. Both of those things are now, like everything else, up for debate. If Avlon is right that we need something bigger than ourselves to rally around, the climate has been making its case since long before that November. That’s just when it started making its case to me.

This year’s anniversary run is in the books. The real one is still ahead: on November 1st, five boroughs, 26 miles. I’ll check the ten-day forecast obsessively. I already know better than to bet on a cold snap. But I’m bringing the throwaway sweatshirt anyway.