Something like love

High-fiving hundreds of strangers made me feel alive

A few weeks ago I woke up early to volunteer for a race, one of the first of the year, a 10K in Central Park. The night doorman was still on duty.

“Hey! It’s been a while,” I said. I was already running late.

“Good luck out there,” he said, getting up to hold the door for me. It was still dark.

He’s usually the doorman on duty when I leave for my own races, sometimes as early as 4 a.m., a foil blanket wrapped around me for warmth which never fails to make me feel like a walking human burrito. By the time I come back, the shift has always changed.

This early in the morning, New York feels like elsewhere. There are fewer signs of life, and traffic signals are just suggestions. A few people are always outside, walking their dogs in pajamas.

I jogged the three miles to volunteer check-in, face hurting in the cold. They were handing out yellow vests and beanies that said VOLUNTEER. I was surprised by how many New York Road Runners staff members I recognized, struck by the thought that this was the core backbone of people that ensured that races attended by thousands—often tens of thousands—kept happening.

“I ran the half! How’d you like the full?” a smiling man asked as he checked me in, commenting on my Philadelphia Marathon shirt. Nobody would’ve begrudged him for being grumpy, but he was the opposite, uncomplicatedly upbeat as he scanned hundreds of QR codes, asking person after person to turn up the brightness on their phones.

“Great!” I said. “I recognize you from the marathon expo. You were my group leader!”

“It’s so good to see you again! Thanks for volunteering.” As I walked to the hot chocolate station, I heard him making conversation with the next person in line, trying to make their day a little better in the few seconds they had together.

With a few packets of HotHands tucked into my mittens, I found my place with the other volunteers. I was assigned to stand close to the start/finish, my volunteer buddy a tall, unsmiling man. He made no move to introduce himself, so I spent the first few minutes standing uncertainly, answering the occasional question about porta-potties or bib pickup as runners began to arrive. Then, bracing myself, I turned.

“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Jenny.”

“Tim¹,” he replied, shaking it and smiling. His face flooded with warmth. I was glad I hadn’t let the awkwardness win, like it had hundreds of times before.

We stood there talking. He was getting back into running after a few decades away. He’d been at the top of his college track team, but life had gotten in the way: marriage, kids, the usual suspects. I asked him which event he used to run.

“The 5K.”

“So you hate yourself,” I joked.

“Back then, maybe,” he said, laughing. “I think I used to run because I hated myself. But these days I’m doing it because I want to. That’s something closer to love.”

We must have been talking for a while, because at some point the sun had come up. The corrals were filling, fastest at the front, slowest at the back. I’d never seen the elite runners start before, always several corrals back. The best look I ever got was during out-and-backs, the fastest runners finishing while I still had a long way to go.

“I never get to watch them start,” I said.

“Me neither. Want to go closer?”

We walked up to the race barrier separating the course from the rest of Central Park traffic. The heat packs were saving my hands, but my toes were starting to freeze. A woman came up to sing the Star-Spangled Banner, signaling the start of the race. She walked back to her corral as people clapped—she had her own race to run. The day was brighter now, and we could see everyone’s faces. And then they were off.

We were stationed with two other course marshals. The job of a course marshal is to make sure people understand where the course is—a largely useless job for a race that’s one loop of Central Park—and to cheer. We stood there talking for a while and then, in what felt like no time, we saw the fastest runners rounding the bend, many running close to or under a five-minute-per-mile pace. We cheered as the next runners filed in. Then, one of the volunteers stretched out their hand for high-fives, and the rest of us followed, a line of high-fives for anyone who might want them. It was something I’d never done before, and wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for this group.

“Let’s go, runners!” we screamed. “You’re almost there! You got this!” Thousands of strangers streamed past us. We would never know their names, would likely never see them again.

“Thank you so much, volunteers!” runners screamed. “You’re saving me right now!” They saw us and smiled. They stretched out their hands to catch the high-fives, four in a row.

“Let’s go!” they screamed.

“Let’s go!” we screamed back.

People I would’ve been intimidated to reach out to on my own—tall, serious men, angry-looking, older men—saw us and their faces filled with uncomplicated gladness. Many ran from one side of the road to the other to give us high-fives.

The park was beautiful in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt an aliveness that came from simple things: strangers cheering on strangers, the sense that we held something in common.

I thought of a conversation I’d had with my therapist months earlier, when I’d injured my calf. I had a one-mile race coming up and told her I was planning to show up in jeans and a sweater, maybe even Chelsea boots. We talked about the fear of being seen when we aren’t at our best. How often we deem ourselves the least deserving.

And there I was, still standing with the other volunteers, cheering until we lost our voices, hands outstretched. We cheered for runners with injuries, runners finishing their first races, runners wearing jackets from marathons thirty years ago. We were just as excited—more excited, even—to cheer for the last runners as the first. People were showing up to do something hard and that was all that mattered. We were buoyed by the strange beauty of loving people whose names we didn’t know and faces we wouldn’t remember, doing something which seemed unimportant in the grand scale of things but felt like the most important thing in the world.

The hand warmers were wearing off, and the race was winding down. We were told that the other volunteers had already left, some an hour earlier. Besides the staff, we were the only ones still there. “Goodbye,” we said to one another. “We did a good thing.” We hugged, and I started my jog home.

1. I truly cannot remember what this man’s name was so I just made something up. But maybe that’s part of the takeaway too