Marathon Cancellation

Okay, so the NYC Marathon has been cancelled.  The NYT alert bleeped on my I-phone just as I was driving out of New Haven to go home and figure out (1) how to get to the expo; (2) how to get to the start; and (3) how to get home from Manhattan.  None of these adventures was looking to be easy, and I was a bit stressed.  I had just taught a makeup class, and ended up spending about half an hour afterwards chatting with some students (some runners) about the issue.  They generally took the view, as I did, that if the race was on, the thing to do was to run it.  We all wondered if the city was going to be able to pull it off.

When I got the message, I had mixed feelings.  I'm really well trained this year, and the taper has gone well, so I had hopes for a good result.  On the other hand, I felt tremendous relief at having all the uncertainties about the next couple of days resolved.  Even under the best of circumstances the expo and trip to Staten Island are a bit of an ordeal.  Not having to worry about that was a relief.  I was completely comfortable with the decision to cancel.  My main aggravation was that the decision was not made earlier.  The delay created a PR nightmare, but it also had real costs, and Mary Wittenberg deserves, I think, a fair amount of criticism here.  I'm lucky.  I live in New York, I didn't make major travel plans or move heaven and earth to get to NY to run.  I also signed up for another Marathon near my home.  Not everyone has that luxury.  For folks who needed to travel, delaying the decision ramped up their costs substantially (and their anger).  Even for me, the delay had costs. I'm now training for a marathon in two weeks.  If I'd known on Tuesday that the race was cancelled, I would not have tapered.  Now I need to revamp my training schedule in a way that makes fairly little sense: taper down, ramp up, retaper.   Oh well.  I'll live.  Tomorrow, I'll try to find something useful I can do to help with the recovery.

Now, there are still some interesting questions hanging out there.  One thing that I found particularly troubling about the announcement was the reason given.  It seems to me that there are a number of legitimate reasons to cancel the marathon: (1) the logistics were proving so difficult (or at least uncertain) that it was not clear that they would be able to put on a safe quality event; (2) the effort to put on the event would divert resources from or otherwise disrupt recovery.  As of the time of cancellation, both of those explanations were in play.  Both would require the NYRR to acknowledge that the damage caused by Sandy was worse than expected, but there's no dishonor in that.  Similarly, if neither of these were true, and they had the ability to pull it off without disrupting the recovery, they could have doubled down.  Neither was the explanation given.  The explanation was that the Marathon had become "divisive" rather than "unifying."  This, in a word, is blaming the critics without responding to the criticism.  If the goal is to heal the divisiveness, blame shifting is not the way to do it.

I was prepared to forgive this as a statement made in the heat of the moment, but today I got an e-mail from NYRR announcing the race's cancellation.  This is the explanatory paragraph:

The decision was made after it became increasingly apparent that the people of our city and the surrounding tri-state area were still struggling to recover from the damage wrought by the recent extreme weather conditions. That struggle, fueled by the resulting extensive and growing media coverage antagonistic to the marathon and its participants, created conditions that raised concern for the safety of both those working to produce the event and its participants. While holding the race would not have required diverting resources from the recovery effort, it became clear that the apparent widespread perception to the contrary had become the source of controversy and division. Neither NYRR nor the City could allow a controversy over the marathon to result in a dangerous situation or to distract attention from all the critically important work that is being done to help New York City recover from the storm.

First of all, it is incoherent.  I'm not sure what is meant by saying that the "struggle [to recover]," was "fueled by the resulting extensive and growing media coverage antagonistic to the marathon and its participants."  Second, it basically says that the race was killed by a bunch of potentially violent whiners.  If your goal is healing, then that is not a constructive thing to even suggest.  Lots of things get said on social media.  It seems to me, either you are able to put on a quality positive event at an acceptable cost or you're not.  You don't blame your audience.  You accept the fact that a casualty of Sandy is this year's marathon and you move on.

I don't think that this is going to harm the race in the long term.  Other Marathons have suffered from weather induced bad days.  Boston boiled its participants last year.  Chicago boiled its participants a few years back, and then cancelled mid-race.  People will still come to Boston and Chicago to race.  Next year's race will be doubly significant after this year's cancellation.  I do think that Mary Wittenberg deserves some very serious criticism, both for her lack of judgment and her communication skills.  I find myself wondering what Fred Lebo would have done under similar circumstances.  I wonder who the new face of New York running will be . . .