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The Long Run: A New York City Firefighter's Triumphant Comeback from Crash Victim to Elite Athlete - Softcover

Long, Matt; Butler, Charles

 
9781609611798: The Long Run: A New York City Firefighter's Triumphant Comeback from Crash Victim to Elite Athlete
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1609611799 ISBN 13: 9781609611798
Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A New York City firefighter's emotional and inspiring memoir of learning to run again after a debilitating accident, based on the wildly popular March 2009 piece in Runner's World.

On the morning of December 22, 2005, Matt Long was cycling to work in the early morning when he was struck by and sucked under a 20-ton bus making an illegal turn. The injuries he sustained pushed him within inches of his life. Miraculously, more than 40 operations and months later, Matt was able to start his recovery. In spite of the severity of his injuries, Matt found the psychological consequences of the accident nearly as hard to process. He would no longer be able to compete at the highest level.
In the 18 months before the accident, he had competed in more than 20 events including several triathlons and marathons and had qualified for running's most prestigious race, the Boston Marathon.
After the accident, his doctor told him he'd be lucky if he could even walk without a cane.

The Long Run is an emotional and incredibly honest story about Matt's determination to fight through fear, despair, loneliness, and intense physical and psychological pain to regain the life he once had. The book chronicles Matt's road to recovery as he teaches himself to walk again and, a mere three years later, to run in the 2008 New York City Marathon—a gimpy seven-and-a-half hour journey through the five boroughs. "Running saved my life," Matt says, and his embrace of the running community and insistence on competing in the marathon has inspired many, turning him into a symbol of hope and recovery for untold numbers of others.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matt Long is the founder of the I Will Foundation, which assists men, women, boys, and girls taking on pursuits they previously thought were beyond their reach. He lives in New York City.

Charles Butler is an editor at Runner's World and teaches journalism at Lehigh University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

THE CHASE IS ON

As I stood there on that unusually warm November morning, looking all around me, everything seemed to say New York.

I was a row or so back from the starting line of the 2005 New York City Marathon, with the Manhattan skyline, shrouded in a dank, soupy fog, rising off in the distance beyond New York Harbor. Nearby, my teammates, 150 or so New York City firefighters, were doing their final stretches and giving each other one last command: Beat the cops, okay, beat the NYPD. Any second, Frank Sinatra would be blaring over the loudspeakers, so that every last one of the 37,597 runners about to take off from Staten Island via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for a 26.2-mile race through the city's four other boroughs could hear--what else?--"New York, New York."

Like I said, everything seemed to say New York.

But all I could think about was Boston.

Boston? What had gotten into me? I was a New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, with the accent to prove it. When I used to have hair, I combed it like Tony Manero, John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever; my sisters, Eileen and Maureen, called me John Revolting. Now I lived in midtown Manhattan, where I was a firefighter with Ladder Company 43 in East Harlem, and on this marathon day, to remember all my fellow firefighters who died on September 11, 2001, I had stenciled "343" on my left arm. I also owned three bars in Manhattan, and if needed I could tell you where to go for the best Manhattan clam chowder, Brooklyn lager, or New York strip in the city. I had nothing against Boston--in fact, I was a huge Bill Buckner fan, and I'd have a beer with Denis Leary any day of the week. But New York was my town.

Still, at that moment I couldn't get that other city out of my mind.

"Hey, Matty? Matty? How you feeling?"

"Shane, I'm good, bro. I'm good. How about you?"

"I'm ready. Just keep the pace, Matty, keep the pace."

To me it sounded like Shane McKeon, a training partner and another firefighter on the starting line, was saying, "Keep the faith." In a way, he was. He was reminding me to stay steady. Keep the pace. If I could click off 26.2 miles at a pace of about seven minutes and 15 seconds per mile, that would get me to the finish line in Central Park in three hours and 10 minutes. And that would easily beat my best-ever marathon time by nearly 40 minutes. And, if everything went right, that would give me a shot at finishing among the top 10 firefighters running on this day, which would help us in our annual race-within-a-race against the police department.And best of all, that would win me a prized spot in next year's Boston Marathon.

And that's why I had Beantown on the brain. I wanted to run the most famous race of all. Boston.

They've been staging the Boston Marathon every April since 1897, and for most of those years only a select crowd gets to take part. To earn an official race entry, you need to nail a pretty demanding time based on your age. So, at 39, I had to run a 3:15 marathon. Boston race officials allow a 59-second grace period, but not a second more. I didn't want to chance a close call, so a few weeks earlier I told Shane that I would go out a bit faster--I'd aim for a 3:10 finish, giving myself a five-minute cushion.

Whatever it took to make it to Boston, I was game.

Still, even with my plan in place I knew there were no guarantees when it came to a race like a marathon. The day's weather could trip you up, and today's temperatures were expected to rise to the mid-60s, scorching for late fall. I also worried that I might feel flat after so many weeks of intense training; I had been running upwards of 50 miles a week since May. And then there was the fact that I was still relatively new to the competitive running scene. Just two years ago I was a firefighter with a sore back and a triple chin; without really noticing, I had packed an extra 35 £ds on my five-foot-ten frame. I was up to 212 £ds, and behind my aching back friends were calling me Beer Belly Matty and Fatty Long. But then I found religion--or I should say running, as well as biking and swimming. In other words, I found the world of triathlons.

Egged on by my friend Noel Flynn, I trained through the winter of 2004 for my first triathlon--a 1.5-kilometer swim, 40-kilometer bike, and 10- kilometer run--that spring. When I completed it, I couldn't wait for the next one. And the one after that. I got addicted to the competition and the training and the camaraderie among the athletes I met at different events. I joined a triathlon club. I tracked my mile-split times and my heart rate after every workout. I logged the number of miles I put on my running shoes, retiring a pair when it hit 300. I consumed nutrition books. I started preaching that bagels are not your friends at family parties. I cut back on my beer intake--a huge concession for a guy who owns bars. And I started racing every chance I could. In 2004, my first full year of training, I did 14 triathlons of different lengths, and traveled everywhere from Long Island to New Jersey to Texas to do them. The adrenaline rush from the training and the competing was like nothing I had ever experienced- -except maybe the rush of running to a fire with my ladder company. And all the work paid off in other ways as well: I dropped to 175 £ds, and the backache disappeared for good. Suddenly, I was in the best shape of my life.

Then I made the ultimate commitment: I signed up for an Ironman, an event that can make waste of even the best athlete over the course of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run. It was in Lake Placid, New York, in July 2005, four months before the New York City Marathon. My training buddies thought I was nuts. "Matty, what's the rush?" Frank Carino, a close friend and fellow firefighter, asked one day after we did a long, hard training run together. Frank had attempted his first Ironman only after competing in smaller ones for five years. "The Ironman can take a huge toll on your body. You can build up slowly, you know."

"Frank, I know, but the thing is, I love this stuff--even when it hurts."

No, there was no talking me out of it. On July 26 I did my first Ironman, finishing in 11 hours and 18 minutes, and in 279th place out of about 2,000 finishers. I did the marathon leg--the third and final one--in three hours and 44 minutes, nearly nine minutes faster than my last solo marathon seven years earlier. A pretty good showing, I thought. "Pretty good?" Frank said after we were done. "That was fantastic. Matty, you've got to slow down, you're catching up to me. You're definitely going to Kona someday."

He was talking about Kona, Hawaii, site of the annual Iron-man World Championship. Frank had qualified for the first time with his race in Lake Placid. For me, Kona would be a goal come 2006. First, I had to make it to Boston.

I looked at my watch: 10:09 a.m. One minute until the cannon blast to start the marathon. Just then, John McLaughlin, an FDNY lieutenant who once ran this race in well under three hours, shouted to me.

"Hey, Matt, what are you looking to do today?"

"Three-ten, John," I shouted back.

"Three-ten. Sounds good to me. Why don't you run with me?"

Huh? He wasn't part of my marathon game plan. I had run hundreds of miles with Noel and Shane and Frank over the past few months. But none with John McLaughlin. Besides, he was faster than me; he could throw me off pace. "Hey, thanks, John, but just go ahead. Enjoy."

"Come on, Matt. Come out with me; we'll do it together."

"Thanks, bro, but I'm planning on running the first two miles kind of slow, maybe at 7:45 pace. That way I won't die later."

"What? How are you going to run 3:10 doing that? You're crazy."

Just then, BOOM! The race was on, and John was...

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Verlag
Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1609611799
ISBN 13 
9781609611798
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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