‘It is what it is’

Hello! Happy Friday – and welcome back to Footprint.

✉️ For the rest of the year, Footprint will be published on the first Friday of each month. As always, get in touch with ideas, tips and feedback. And if you know anyone who might enjoy the newsletter, they can sign up here.

Around 17 miles into November’s New York City Marathon, Steve Mura started noticing some issues.

Mura, widely known as Coach Steve, spent his hundredth New York Road Runners race escorting a rotating cast of familiar faces through a relay.

He had spent the preceding days with colleagues at NYRR at the marathon’s expo, enthusiastically talking thousands of nervous runners through the course they were about to run. For Mura, things didn’t go to plan.

‘I got this,’ he would later recall thinking at mile 19, before mile 20 delivered a reality check. ‘I don’t got this,’ he thought. ‘Let’s walk.’

The Willis Avenue Bridge is a turning point in the NYC marathon: the moment for many that rubber hits road, as fatigue slowly, but surely, reaches levels that rival the energy, excitement and sheer joy of what comes before.

Mura, 41, had handed off his official job that day a few miles earlier, when another coach took over the relay. All he had to do now was finish.

“I knew it was more serious than this little strain,” he reflected in an interview. “It is what it is. I couldn’t change it. I could’ve pulled up earlier, but I wanted to finish it.”

After pacing countless runners through the NYC marathon, Mura knew the course inside out. This time, though, he saw it from altogether different angles. The relay had set out at the very front of the race, and been passed by the elite women and men, before the sub-elite athletes caught up. As he walked, Mura drifted deeper into the pack of almost 60,000 runners making their way from Staten Island to Central Park. 

It was turning into a “really long” day. But Mura’s zeal for this sport is infectious. It practically radiates from the stage of his expo runthroughs, and lightens the heavy legs of those apprehensively pushing for a time he happens to be pacing. Now he turned it inward.

For once he wasn’t focused on pushing himself, or pacing others. He high-fived “every kid” he saw. He watched exhausted runners hug loved ones on Fifth Avenue. He saw grit on faces give way to something softer as those around him realized they could – and would – finish.

Mura did, too, and even managed to work up to a fast hobble for the final steps. “Probably the third person I saw” after crossing the line was a physical therapist at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery. “She was like, ‘something’s wrong’,” he said. 

He left on crutches, albeit with a medal.

A few weeks and scans later, Mura knew he had a significant stress fracture in his hip. By the time he had surgery in December, he was told he wouldn’t run for three months. The crutches stuck around until January.

“There’s a shock to it,” said Mura, “but I also know that comes with the sport. I put myself in that position, in a sense. I was okay with it.”

He read a lot. He spent time with his kids. Of all the winters to be out of action, New York’s coldest in more than a decade was a good one. In time, his dog was grateful for some long walks.

“I don’t know, I just found peace in it. I learned to accept being stationary for a while,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I didn’t look at people’s Strava and wish I was out there for those runs.”

“There were those days,” added Mura. “But I was on a different journey at that point. There has been times when I’m sure I’ve been the one running, and someone else is looking at that.”

It wasn’t until the second week of March that he found himself on a trampoline, anxiously bouncing for four long minutes as he awaited the moment of truth. Mura stepped off, onto a treadmill. 

Ten minutes went by, of running and walking, running and walking, running and walking. “We just gradually built up from that,” he said. Within a few weeks he was outside, gradually working his way back.

From the outset, Mura was in no doubt of his target. “My goal is to pace the RBC Brooklyn Half.”

The Brooklyn half marathon takes place each May, around six months after the NYC marathon.

Mura had run it no fewer than eleven times, including at least half a dozen pacing runners shooting to finish in two hours. This time would be a little different, as he paced runners pushing to finish in three.

There was part of Mura, at least at first, which compared where he was with where he used to be, and what he used to be able to do: run a half marathon in two hours, without stopping, or much thought.

“I had to kind of remove that from myself,” he said. “I’m no longer 20, 25 Steve. I’m this new version of me. That may be better. But right now, I’m not there.”

He was both excited and nervous, having never run – let alone paced – three hours in the half before. Guiding a “fabulous” group through Brooklyn with a fellow NYRR pacer, he set out running for two minutes and walking for a minute and a half, on rotation.

Half a year after hobbling through Central Park, Mura was running again. He was back. Finishing on Coney Island that morning “meant more” than other races, he said, “because it was a different reason why.”

Already, of course, his mind has shifted from the finish line in May to the start line in November. Another NYC marathon awaits.

“I’m still not 100%,” said Mura. “It’s still a process of becoming – whether it’s a new version of my running, maybe back to where I was, or maybe better. I don’t know. But I’m happy just to be running, and doing what I love.”

Three pieces worth your time this weekend…

🗽 Zohran Mamdani Shares His Favorite Marathoning Moment • Speaking to Runner’s World, the New York City mayor describes crossing the finish line of its marathon – and the consequences of having a cigarette, ten miles in. “The rest of the race went downhill pretty quickly,” he says

😫 Women Resist Fatigue Better than Men. Does It Matter? • Alex Hutchinson explores the research into one of the hottest topics in endurance science for Outside, as more female athletes beat male rivals over really long distances

💭 Stewards Of The Sport • Cole Townsend makes the case in his Running Supply newsletter for veterans of running, with proven knowledge, to provide support for those entering the sport for the first time

Burnout Paradise was “the longest running show in NYC,” according to its marketing campaign: quite the achievement, when you think Chicago has been going since 1996. This show only arrived in New York in February.

Before any ticketholder could demand their money back, they walked into Astor Place Theatre to find the cast warming up next to four treadmills.

Billed as a “euphoric, visceral celebration of our tendency to run full tilt towards life’s endless challenges,” Burnout Paradise – performed by the Australian collective Pony Cam – features five performers scrambling to complete a dizzying array of tasks, from cooking a three-course meal to filling out a grant application, all while running.

Each of the treadmills was designated its own category (leisure, performance, admin and survival) setting the stage for a show Pony Cam describes as “part comedy, part endurance feat, part theatrical explosion”.

On the final night of its three-month run in New York, as the cast simultaneously rattled through a list of impressive and increasingly absurd tasks, the message was clear.

“I think the show is really trying to capture that feeling of what it's like to do too much, too fast, for too long, and it examines the consequences of that,” Pony Cam’s Ava Campbell told WNYC. “We wanted to create a picture of what that's like.”

A little while ago, I was struggling to work something out. I was trying to square my love of working on this newsletter, and talking to people across the sport, with the reality that – at least for now – I don’t have the time I want to write it each fortnight.

I certainly didn’t want to stop. But I also didn’t want to hastily pull together something that wasn’t interesting, or useful, for the sake of hitting send.

And so, I did what I almost always do when I can’t figure something out, and went for a run. Here’s where I landed, as the sun came down over the National Mall:

For the rest of the year, Footprint will be out on the first Friday of each month – a little less frequently, but still hopefully worthy of your time.

As always, get in touch with ideas, tips and feedback. And if you have any suggestions for great runs in Washington DC, please drop me a line.