New York City Marathon: The story of the Central Park jog that became the world's largest marathon

On September 13, 1970, one hundred and twenty-seven runners showed up at the entrance to Central Park. They were to complete four laps of a ten-kilometer loop, under the indifferent gaze of Sunday joggers and strollers. Fifty-five of them would cross the finish line. The winner, a Long Island firefighter named Gary Muhrcke, pocketed a watch and a few dollars out of his own pocket. No one that day imagined that half a century later, this private race would bring together more than fifty thousand runners and be followed by millions of spectators massed along the streets of the five boroughs of New York.

Fred Lebow, the man who didn't run very fast but saw far

Behind this first edition was one man: Fred Lebow, born Fischel Lebowitz in Arad, Romania, in 1932. An Orthodox Jewish child during the Nazi occupation, he traveled through Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and then Ireland before moving to the United States. In New York, he made a name for himself in the textile industry, specifically in the cheap clothing of the garment district. But it was running, discovered late in life, that became his true obsession. In 1969, he joined the New York Road Runners Club. A year later, with a few enthusiasts including ultramarathoner Ted Corbitt, he organized this Central Park marathon, financed with his own money.

Lebow was not a great champion: he would finish his marathons in over five hours, far from the podiums. But he had an idea that, without knowing it, matched exactly the one being championed at the same time on the other side of the Atlantic by a small Swiss magazine with a circulation of a few thousand copies: running does not belong only to champions. It must be democratized, taken out of the stadiums, and become a celebration for everyone.

1976: the five-borough bet

For six years, the marathon remained a Central Park affair—private and methodical. Then 1976 arrived: America was celebrating the bicentennial of its independence, and the city of New York, then in the midst of a budget crisis and shunned by a portion of its population, was looking for a symbol of reconciliation. Ted Corbitt proposed a simple idea: have the marathon run through the city's five boroughs, from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in Staten Island to Central Park, passing through Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

Many, at the time, deemed the idea absurd, even dangerous. Closing the streets of such a vast city for a footrace? On October 24, 1976, 2,090 runners set off nonetheless; 1,549 reached the finish. Bill Rodgers won in 2:10:10, the first of his four New York successes. But the true winner of the day was the city itself: images of the marathon traversing the five boroughs went around the world and gave New York a new image—popular and unifying—a far cry from the bankrupt city then depicted by the press.

Grete Waitz, Fred Lebow's final stretch

The marathon grew quickly: ten thousand participants as early as 1978, the arrival of the Norwegian Grete Waitz, who broke the women's world record on her first attempt in 1978 and won nine times between 1978 and 1988. In 1990, Fred Lebow learned he had a brain tumor. Two years later, on November 1, 1992, he ran his marathon alongside Grete Waitz, who had become his closest friend. They crossed the line together in 5:32:35. Fred Lebow died on October 9, 1994, at sixty-two. A statue now represents him at the entrance to Central Park, eternally frozen checking his watch—watching, as he did for twenty-five years, the runners arrive.

The Spiridon echo

There is something profoundly "Spiridonian" in this story, even if Fred Lebow probably never heard of the Swiss magazine. In the same decade, both movements affirmed, each in its own way, that running is not reserved for an athletic elite: it is a practice open to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, Sunday jogger or champion alike, as long as you enjoy it. The documentary Free to Run, which we mentioned in a previous article, tells exactly how these two parallel stories—that of Fred Lebow in New York and that of Spiridon in Europe—participated in the same underlying movement: the liberation of running.

Today, the New York City Marathon sells out in minutes and turns away more runners than it accepts. Yet it remains faithful, in spirit, to that 1970 intuition: that the starting line of a marathon belongs to everyone, not just the best.