Following the New York City Marathon

I've decided I want to post some of my work from graduate reporting classes on this blog as a way for people to read and comment on anything I am up to. First up, my profile of Joy Haser, an extremely nice woman from Huntington who ran her first marathon ever in New York City last weekend. A little background on why I decided to profile Joy.

Everyone in my reporting class had to find a runner from our hometowns and do a profile of their race. Well, there was nobody from the Wheeling or Ohio Valley area in the race this year. However, I do consider Huntington a type of second home after graduating from Marshall University this spring. I found out Joy was running, contacted her through Facebook and went from there. Her family was extremely nice, and I was glad I could meet them and get a small dinner with them (thanks for picking up the tab on my pile of fries Nick!). Anyway, here is the story. Hopefully it can find publication in the Huntington Herald-Dispatch this weekend.

NEW YORK -- Running for Joy Haser began 11 years ago at Huntington High on an old treadmill that couldn’t go more than four miles per hour, and reaching the one-mile mark in about 15 minutes seemed impressive.

Since that first jog, Haser, 28, has accumulated more miles than she could have imagined. The Huntington native has run numerous 5Ks, 10Ks and half marathons in college and on her own, but the challenge of a 26.2 mile marathon has eluded her.

However, on Sunday Haser grasped her brass ring of running after finishing one of the most enjoyable and exhausting tasks by conquering 40th ING New York City Marathon.

Haser finished with a final time of 4:22:15, just shy of her goal of breaking four hours. Haser had several cramps and thigh pains throughout the race, but she said the experience of running New York for her first marathon was memorable from start to finish.

“From the very beginning it was just incredible walking around and hearing all the other languages that I didn’t recognize with runners from all over the world,” Haser said. “There were 40,000 people in one area at the start. It would be like if everybody in Huntington gathered to do a race.”

Joy Haser rode the wave of momentum through New York’s five boroughs with the help of more than a million random spectators and her own group of supporters. Joy’s husband, Nick Haser, and her parents Ed and Shelley Vincent made the nine-hour drive north with Joy but almost missed her during the race entirely.

They positioned themselves between mile markers 17 and 18 along First Avenue in Manhattan but grew concerned when it seemed that Joy was off her pace of nine miles per hour. When she turned off the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan at 16 miles, Joy started to scan the crowd but neither she nor her family spotted each other.

It turned out Joy simply got lost in the sea of 43,000 participants in the field. When Nick found out through the course’s online electronic tracking system that Joy was past the 22-mile mark and headed toward Central Park, he made a beeline through the city and caught Joy just as she was about to finish.

“When there were people running by that I knew she was faster than I thought something was wrong,” Nick Haser said. “When I found out she was ahead of us my only thought was we got to catch her.”

Joy received motivation in other ways, however. When she removed her long-sleeve shirt in Brooklyn, hundreds of spectators began cheering her name, which was easy to figure out because she had “JOY” written on her arms in black marker.

“I was just amazed with how many people came out, and having all those spectators is really what gets you through the race,” Joy said.

Getting to the New York City Marathon was a challenge in itself for Joy. The first setback came when Nick, who ran the marathon in 2001 and planned to do it again this year, was injured early in training. He convinced Joy she should still run the race because the sights and crowd are hard to beat.

Then a little more than a week before the race, Joy injured her IT band, which is a common running injury of the thigh, while breaking in a new pair of Brooks running shoes on a 20-mile practice run. She was back to her old pair of purple and silver Asics for the marathon but still had pain early on in her legs and her feet.

A similar type of injury has kept her away from previous attempts at marathons in Nashville and Myrtle Beach. Joy said she loses flexibility in her knee on longer runs when her IT band flares up, so she was proactive leading up to the race by stretching, icing and taking ibuprofen.

Joy didn’t have to struggle to get to the finish line like she feared before the race. Instead the completion of her first marathon was the culmination many years of running.

Joy’s work ethic improved her running so much during her lone year of running at Huntington High that she received a partial scholarship to run for Covenant College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Lookout Mountain, Ga. After a year she transferred back home and enrolled at Marshall where she expected to join the cross-country team but started having her first set of running related injuries because of her training.

“I loved running so much that even during the offseason when other people would take time off I would train,” she said. “I hated racing but I loved training.”

Joy decided to just stick to running on her own as she completed her degree in recreation therapy in 2003.

Joy also ran to raise money for World Vision, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that supports children and families in more than 100 countries. Between Joy and Nick, they sponsor six children through World Vision from countries like India, Ethiopia and Bolivia. They both write letters to their sponsored children and send about $30 a month for financial support to each child. When she isn’t running, Joy works as an activity director at Woodlands Retirement Community in Huntington.

Nick still has eligibility to run in the New York Marathon in the future because of his injury, and now that Joy has completed her first full 26.2 mile race it is more reason to keep training together and hopefully race together.

“Now that I can train better, be more prepared and know what to expect,” Joy said, “I’m ready to come back and get my sub-four marathon.”