The New York City Marathon's real heroes finish after dark
Many follow the same playbook, carefully painting a behind-the-scenes portrait of elite athletes pursuing greatness – from cyclists confronting the steepest climbs of the Tour de France and surfers hunting vast waves to tennis players vying for grand slams and track sprinters for medals.
'That's kind of boring,' Michael Ring says of the genre. 'It's just another guy who figured out what he was best at in middle school, and didn't go to high school with normal kids, and maybe went to college, and dropped out and became a millionaire tennis player.'
Ring, 61, is among a handful of amateur runners who appear in Final Finishers, a new short film about the back of the New York City Marathon pack.
Many hours after the winners cross the line each year, the sun goes down over Central Park, the crowds thin, and race organizers start to hand out glow sticks. Those still out on the course, working their way through the last few grueling miles in the dark, are drawn in by the hum of a party at the finish.
Turning away from record breakers and podium chasers, the film celebrates everyday runners: those more likely to dwell on whether, rather than when, they will finish 26.2 miles. Extraordinary stories are not exclusively found at the front of the pack.
Olympians including Meb Keflezighi, Conner Mantz, Clayton Young and Beverly Ramos were in the audience in June when Final Finishers premiered at the Tribeca Festival. 'Getting to the finish line, no matter how many hours it takes you, is life changing,' Keflezighi, who won the NYC Marathon in 2009 and Boston Marathon in 2014, tells the Guardian. 'Everybody has a story.'
Take Ring. In 2014, he was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition. 'I went from fine to paralyzed in a couple of days,' he says. Over many months he slowly, but surely, progressed from a wheelchair to crutches, and then walked with a cane. In time he returned to running, too, with the help of ankle braces, and finished the 2017 NYC Marathon – the first of many post-recovery – in just under 10 hours.
Increasingly, major marathons have moved to make sure runners who finish with such times are not overlooked. In London, for example, tailwalkers set out after the final starter begins the race, and the finish line stays open until midnight.
Still, for those following such races, and the wider sport, much of the coverage remains pinned around those in the lead pack. The makers of Final Finishers are betting viewers will find runners far behind just as, if not more, inspiring.
Runners featured in the film 'are the most relatable to so many people out there, who don't see themselves as a quote unquote runner,' said Rob Simmelkjaer, CEO of New York Road Runners, the organization behind the New York City Marathon. 'They can start to see themselves as runners in a way that watching someone win the marathon in two hours and five minutes is not going to make them feel they can be a runner. Because they know they can never do that.'
Distribution plans for Final Finishers have yet to be announced. With another short film in the works, New York Road Runners recently launched East 89th St Productions, a production studio. It hopes to produce a docuseries, too.
Will a streaming platform, or broadcaster, bite? The wave of professional-focused sport docuseries appears to have crested. The new series of Tour de France: Unchained on Netflix will be the last. Six Nations: Full Contact, also on Netflix, and Make or Break, an Apple series following World Surf League stars, have been canceled.
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But as it draws up its plans for films and series, New York Road Runners is not rushing to put more elite athletes on screen. This has, at least at first, caused a little confusion.
'As we went out and talked to a lot of production companies out there, there was a lot of that that came back to us. It was, 'Oh, well, you know, who are the stars?' and 'are you going to get [Eliud] Kipchoge?',' says Simmelkjaer. 'And we don't necessarily subscribe to that idea, that it has to be the stars.'
'We're definitely starting to see the tide changing,' claimed Martinus Evans, founder of Slow AF Run Club. 'I don't want to say it like this, but I'm gonna say it like this: people are not necessarily excited about elite athletes' stories. People are not excited about people who spent their life running, and they're expected to get first place.'
A doctor who told Evans, 38, that he needed to lose weight laughed when said he wanted to run a marathon. 'Instead of punching the doctor like I wanted to, I bought running shoes that day,' he says in the film, which documents how he ultimately realized his goal, despite the doubters, and 'cried like a fucking baby' at the finish.
'What's more exciting, and what's a lot more interesting, is the underdog: somebody you did not expect to be out there,' Evans tells the Guardian. 'Somebody that you looked at and was like, 'Oh no, he's not going to run a marathon' – like me. But I ran eight of them. And I'm training for number nine.'
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