{"id":17375,"date":"2026-09-17T23:04:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T23:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=17375"},"modified":"2026-09-17T23:04:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T23:04:35","slug":"a-9-11-running-ritual-the-nyc-marathon-and-disappearing-winters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=17375","title":{"rendered":"A 9\/11 Running Ritual, the NYC Marathon, and Disappearing Winters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"justify-start\">\n<nav class=\"align-left col-span-full mb-base\" data-pom-e2e-test-id=\"breadcrumbs\"\/>\n<p>Five years ago, a 9\/11 anniversary run turned into a marathon habit. On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, ahead of another New York City Marathon, I still think about the autumn that never came. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--$?--><template id=\"B:1\"\/><!--\/$--><\/p>\n<div><\/p>\n<p class=\"fp-leadCaption py-tight text-left font-utility text-utility3-size leading-utility3-line-height text-secondary\"> (Photo: Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"article-body\">\n<p>Updated September 17, 2026 04:24PM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>On September 11, 2021, I sat down in front of a bodega near the East Broadway NYC subway stop in Chinatown, chugged a Gatorade, and took my right sneaker off. A half size too small, it turned out. Yep, my middle toe was bleeding through the sock. I had just run 13 miles\u2014the longest run I had ever attempted before that morning was five. And yet, sitting there with an empty bottle in one hand and a shoe in the other, I had a thought I\u2019d never had before: <i>maybe I could run a marathon<\/i>. Or at least a half.<\/p>\n<p>It was the 20th anniversary of 9\/11. I run to think and that day needed more miles than most. It was also, though I didn\u2019t know it yet, the day I caught the racing bug: two years later I ran my first marathon, the New York City Marathon. I\u2019ve done a long run every September 11th since. This year, on the 25th anniversary of that day, I did it again. And in six weeks I\u2019ll be running the NYC Marathon once more.<\/p>\n<p>I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and never left. Three months in, I was starting my first job out of college at a magazine, and every morning I cut through Washington Square Park to get there, feeling the unearned invincibility of being 22 and recently employed in the greatest city on earth. That morning, on my way out the door of a SoHo apartment I could barely afford, I forgot something and went back upstairs. My sister called on the landline from New Jersey and told me to turn on the TV. I did, and then I went up to my roof.<\/p>\n<p>What I remember most about that fall isn\u2019t the ash or the flyers or lining up to donate blood. It\u2019s that for about six weeks, something real and almost unrecognizable took hold, a version of the country that seemed to have agreed, briefly, on what mattered. And then, slowly over twenty-five years, that version of the country slipped away.<\/p>\n<p>I walked a lot that fall. SoHo to the Upper West Side and back, more than once, up to the bar near Columbia where, a few months earlier, in a summer publishing course at the journalism school, I\u2019d discovered gin and tonics. It was too easy to be outside. Too warm. That November was the warmest New York had ever recorded: no real cold, no snow, no cider-and-scarves reset. I wanted it badly, more than I ever had\u2014the brisk morning that makes you put your hands in your pockets, the first flurries that make the city go quiet for an hour. It never came.<\/p>\n<p>I thought about that non-winter again on this year\u2019s run, listening to NPR\u2019s Michel Martin <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"article-content-link text-brand-primary underline hover:text-brand-primary\/85 break-words overflow-wrap-anywhere underline-offset-[3px]\" data-afl-p=\"0\" href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2026\/09\/11\/nx-s1-5964871\/john-avlon-rudy-giulianis-chief-speechwriter-during-9-11-attacks-recounts-that-day\">interview John Avlon<\/a>, who was Rudy Giuliani\u2019s chief speechwriter back when Giuliani was the mayor everyone (temporarily) agreed to like. Avlon\u2019s point was a fair one: The real lesson of 9\/11 isn\u2019t the unity itself, it\u2019s that we squandered it\u2014and that we shouldn\u2019t need a catastrophe to find our way back to each other. He was right about that. What he didn\u2019t say was what, exactly, we\u2019re supposed to unite around. Twenty-five years on, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s much of a mystery. I think it\u2019s the weather.<\/p>\n<p>The warm fall of 2001 was a kind of preview\u2014of the floods in Nepal taking towns that had stood for centuries. Of the heat domes parked over cities with no infrastructure for a hundred and ten degrees, because they never used to need any. Of the summer New York\u2019s sky turned the color of a traffic cone because a forest a thousand miles away was on fire. This is, in a pretty literal sense, the whole premise of this publication: that there\u2019s a natural world worth going outside for, and that it\u2019s supposed to be dependable, and forever. Both of those things are now, like everything else, up for debate. If Avlon is right that we need something bigger than ourselves to rally around, the climate has been making its case since long before that November. That\u2019s just when it started making its case to <i>me<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>This year\u2019s anniversary run is in the books. The real one is still ahead: on November 1st, five boroughs, 26 miles. I\u2019ll check the ten-day forecast obsessively. I already know better than to bet on a cold snap. But I\u2019m bringing the throwaway sweatshirt anyway.<\/p>\n<p><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/essays-culture\/running-nyc-marathon-climate-crisis-warm-fall-2001\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Five years ago, a 9\/11 anniversary run turned into a marathon habit. On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, ahead of another New York City Marathon, I still think about the autumn that never came. (Photo: Getty Images) Updated September 17, 2026 04:24PM On September 11, 2021, I sat down in front of a bodega<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wild-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}