Peter Hessler a New Yorker Man-in-the-Marathon

Writing on participants associated with the magazine, Ian Crouch blogs:

The staff writer Peter Hessler will be running his third marathon. His first was in 1981, when we was just twelve—“back when they’d let kids do things like that.” His biggest deprivation this time has been sleep, but he was prepared: “I have twin infants at home, a new fatigue-training tool.”

Of the three, Hessler has the longest trip to the starting line; it’s a distance of many marathons from his home in Colorado. And the trip has not been without incident, as he revealed when asked about his weekend meal plan:

My flight got cancelled and I’m stuck in an airport in Grand Junction, Colorado. I don’t know if Subway is the ideal pre-race meal, but that’s all they got here. United gave me a ten-dollar voucher. Actually I think that guy Jared is in the race. I better not finish behind him or the Chilean miner.

All three New Yorker partisans say they’re looking forward to a break from running after Sunday, but there’s no rest for the weary—at least not for Peter Hessler, who has work to do Sunday afternoon.

I have to immediately get on a train to Long Island and do an interview. Not my ideal post-race routine but my editor, Willing Davidson [another marathoner from the magazine] , is making me do it. He said I can skip the interview if I end up in the medical tent.

Read Peter on Meb Keflezighi’s Marathon win, and his earlier piece on Ryan Hall, Running to Beijing / The Making of a Long Distance Runner, which has some wonderful autobiographical details.

Per Crouch's follow-up post, Peter's final time was two  hours and forty-five minutes.