My second Marathon - New York City

After recovering from my first marathon in NJ I decided I was ready for another one. Since watching my sister in the NYC Marathon was my inspiration for running I figured this is the next one I wanted to run. I applied to the lottery with 80,000 other entrants and miraculously got in. I've heard stories of people doing this for years and not getting selected so I was excited. My sister, her boyfriend, and another one of our friends also got in which was helpful since we all lived close to one another. I increased my training to an intermediate program and began running 6 days a week. While I'm sure this helped to some degree, the intensity remained low. I ran with my friend, also named DJ, about 3 days a week which helped. His goal was the same as my first marathon, break 4 hours. My only goal was to break my previous time of 3:54 so I continued to train at a 4 hour pace with DJ.
When race day in NY comes everybody knows it. The race that year had nearly 40,000 runners and over 2 million spectators. Every Italian restaurant booked the night before and there are even more tourists than usual. The day of the race I woke up around 4:30am. DJ and I took a cab from the upper east side down to the NYC Public Library where buses waited to drive people to the start in Staten Island. Since all the cabs were full in midtown we stopped along the way and picked up a random runner waiting for a ride. On our ride down he told us this was going to be his first ever marathon and his goal was 2:45 or to beat Lance Armstrong. Later it came out that he's run several marathons in iron man competitions. Him running a 2:45 didn't seem so impossible after all, however it did make me feel pretty slow.
After waiting on Staten Island for 3 hours the race started. DJ and I decided we would to try to run together the whole race. Around mile 6 he had to stop and use the bathroom, and I don't mean to go pee. I had a decision to make, either abandon my friend who has been excited for me to help keep him on pace and probably break my previous time or wait for him and run it together. I decided to wait. Although it seemed like forever since I had to watch thousands or runners pass by, DJ was in and out in a record time of 2 minutes and we were off again. The race went fairly smoothly even though we started off 45 secs/mile faster than our pace. Around mile 18 we hit the wall. DJ hit it much worse than I did this time. Its never a pleasant feeling but sometimes its nice to know other people are hurting more than you are. We eventually finished the race together in 3:56. I felt pretty decent for most of the race, much better than I did in NJ, but I doubt I would have run much faster if I ran on my own. It was a great experience and I helped get a friend cross the finish line in under 4 hours.