On Sunday, November 7, 2021, Larry Trachtenberg will run again in the 50th. Jim Isenberg also ran in the 1st New York City Marathon. He will not return.
Here’s their story…..
The following written content by Aimee Berg
In 1970, on a hot September morning, 127 running enthusiasts safety-pinned paper numbers to their shirts and took off on the inaugural running of the New York City Marathon. The course featured four loops of Central Park, a single water stop, and cost $1 to enter. Only 55 finished, all men.
This year, only one of the original finishers will be competing in the marathon’s 50th running. It will be his first glimpse of the race that now winds through all five boroughs of New York City.
“This is one of my first endeavors as a retired person,” says Larry Trachtenberg, 67, a former special ed teacher originally from Queens, N.Y., who has been training three times a week at home on the west coast.
Trachtenberg says he’s surprised that he is the lone athlete to run the first and the 50th version of the race.
There should have been another: Jim Isenberg
Isenberg, now 70, would love nothing more than to lace up his shoes on Nov. 7. He placed 25th in the original race. He didn’t know Trachtenberg back then, but their lives eventually intersected in several ways. They both ran at Princeton. They both became educators. And they both settled in Eugene, Ore., where they frequently discussed running New York City’s 50th anniversary race.
But in December 2017 everything changed, and there was no chance the Boston native would run this year’s New York race – or any other.
Strangers in a strange race
In 1970, Isenberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Princeton. He had already run four marathons – including Boston twice – when the university’s new cross-country coach, Larry Ellis, told him about a new race in New York City.
To please his coach, Isenberg took a $1.80 bus ride to Port Authority, found his way to the start, and lined up wearing bib 64.
Elsewhere in the field stood 16-year-old Trachtenberg. He hadn’t consulted anyone. He didn’t know how to train. He was fast, but his longest competitive effort was two-and-a-half miles, the standard high school cross-country distance. He had never run a road race, and had spent the summer working for tips at a ritzy summer camp, dashing back and forth to the highway to stay in shape. But he was up for a challenge on the day before he started 12th grade.
Heat decimated the field, attrition set in, and by the third loop, Isenberg said he was ready to jump in a pond and drink half of it. He finished in 3 hours, 18 minutes, 19 seconds.
Trachtenberg, intent on staying in his comfort zone, finished nearly four minutes later in 32nd place.
“My game plan worked perfectly,” he said.
And that was it. One and done for Trachtenberg. No camera, no photos.
“I didn’t think it was going to turn into anything,” Trachtenberg said last week.
If Trachtenberg once again finishes the NYC marathon, he will be the only man in history to endure both the first and the 50th running of what has become the world’s largest marathon, with a record 53,627 finishers in 2019, the last time it was held.
And at the finish, he might see his old Princeton teammate who spent 48 years racing nearly 4,000 miles and, even now, still runs in his dreams. Read more from NPR.
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