Full Transcript for Live From the TCS New York City Marathon Expo Pt. 1 with George Hirsch

Olympic marathon champion from Ethiopia. The award is given to individuals who've made an outstanding contribution to the sport of distance running. A lot of professional athletes have won this award over the years, but many others have as well because it's really all about people who've made a big impact in the sport, especially in New York, especially to New York Road Runners. George, clearly you qualify as one of those people and we were so thrilled to see you elected to receive this award this year. For more than five decades, George has dedicated his life to elevating this sport. He was a co- founder of the New York City Marathon, served as chair of course of Road Runners for many years, and he also did it as a publisher. His background is in media. He was the publisher of Runner's World Magazine, a magazine that so many people know and love. Is there something that really chronicles the sport of running and really played a role in helping it grow? And he was a pretty good runner as well. He ran 40 marathons, that number's right, 40 marathons and his all- time PR was in his forties. We'll get to that in a little while. But George, you've just been such an incredible icon. I would not be sitting in this chair where I am today. This sport, this organization of New York Road Runners, and certainly this event, the TCS New York City Marathon, would not be what it is if it were not for your incredible vision, your contributions, your steadfast dedication to the sport, to this organization, and to this event. So it is really our pleasure to present you with this award today. Becs, will you do the honors? 00:07:00 Rebbeca Gentry: I'm very honored to do this. So George, it's such a pleasure to meet you. I cannot wait for our conversation, but congratulations. 00:07:04 Rob Simmelkjaer: Let's get a big round of applause here in the audience for George Hirsch, the recipient of this year's Abebe Bikila Award and so well deserved. So George, congratulations. 00:07:17 George Hirsch: Thank you so much Rob for your overly generous comments and Becs, I will cherish this. Thank you so much. 00:07:27 Rob Simmelkjaer: So George, let's start. I want to start with you at the start of all of this. 1976, it was probably earlier than that, when someone first came to you with this idea of taking this marathon, which had been run in laps around Central Park for several years and said, " I got an idea. Let's take this thing outside the park and let's have folks run all five boroughs of the City of New York." When you first heard that idea, first of all, who was the first person you heard it from and what was your reaction? 00:08:09 George Hirsch: The first person I heard it from was a genuine New York character named George Spitz. And George, he had what in the old days we used to call a full Rolodex. He worked in the city hall and the audit department, but he knew everyone and he was a political gadfly. He wrote letters to the editors of newspapers and he used to run for office. He never intended to win, but he just wanted to run and make a statement about some issue or another. And he was the first person that I heard the idea from. And Rob, I thought, " That's a big idea." And I wasn't enthusiastic about it at all. I thought, " How are they going to pull this off?" Closing down five boroughs, New York City? I thought, " Oh, come on." 00:09:11 Rob Simmelkjaer: And at what point did you actually start to think, " Wait a second, this is a crazy idea, but maybe this could actually happen." What was the first glimmer of this possibly working? 00:09:25 George Hirsch: That was when this gentleman, George Spitz was in touch with a bunch of people, and one of them was a local politician, very influential named Percy Sutton. He was the Manhattan borough president. And Percy began to embrace the idea and he thought this could work. And he went to two prominent real estate developers in the city, very civic- minded, Jack and Lew Rudin. And up until then, Fred Lebow, who was then the president of the New York Road Runners. He was like, " Come on, we can't do something like this." I remember Fred saying, " This could cost big money. This might cost $ 15,000. How are we going to find that?" And the Rudins agreed to Percy Sutton to put up $ 25,000. And I was publishing a magazine then called New Times, and I put in another 5, 000 at the time. And Percy invited Fred Lebow and me to go down and see the then mayor of the city of New York, a man named Abe Beame in 1976 in New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy and crime was sky- high, and this was the bicentennial of the United States. And our pitch to the mayor was, let's do this to lift the spirit of this beaten up city in conjunction with the toll ships and see if we can do something that would just help lift the community a little bit. The mayor bought it and you know the rest of the story. 00:11:34 Rebbeca Gentry: Well, I can't even get my head around how that would've gone down back in 1976 with a city that was how it was. So first of all, thank you from a running perspective, thank you

and everybody else that was involved. But what I want to talk about is Fred because to a lot of runners today, I think we all know and we hear Fred's name and he's very much a big figure in today's world associated with the TCS New York City Marathon. What was your first thoughts of Fred as a person because you became friends with him? 00:12:11 George Hirsch: Yeah, Fred and I were very close. So Fred Lebow was a Holocaust survivor and he was a colorful personality. At the time I first met him, he was doing knockoffs in the garment center and he started to run because he wanted to get fit for tennis, and he never became a particularly good runner, but he loved running and he joined the club. And at that point, the leader in the organization was a man named Ted Corbitt, who had been the first president of the New York Road Runners. He had been an Olympic marathon runner. He was someone we all looked up to and admired. And Fred jumped in and started using his business skills, his promotion skills, and he and a guy named Vince Chiappetta were the founders of the first New York City Marathon in Central Park in 1970. And that race was small, 127 starters, very small deal, and it went on for five years and it kept growing at a time when running was taking off. It was the beginning of what we all then called the running boom. And Fred was media savvy. He was a promoter. The media loved him because they always knew they could get a story out of Fred and he knew how to build an event. And once the Mayor greenlighted this, Fred found his life's work. 00:14:11 Rob Simmelkjaer: So take me George, to the starting line of the first five burro marathon. I'll never really go there. So I want to go there with you for a second and what that moment was like, what your expectations were for the event. What was that day like and some things that people might be surprised to hear about the first time the runners crossed the Verrazano Bridge to start this race? 00:14:44 George Hirsch: So back then there was one really famous marathon runner and he had won the Olympic marathon and he was an American, and his name was Frank Shorter. And Frank stayed with me the night before the marathon. Fred knew that he had to get Frank Shorter if this race was going to get the attention of the media, and he convinced Frank to do it. And Frank said, " Well, I'll come just to see if there's any chance they can close this city down to run a marathon." And Frank and I drove out to the start that morning and 2000 people, nothing like what we're going to see Sunday with 50, 000 plus. So it wasn't all that organized, it wasn't what it is. We could jog around out at the start. And as we began to line up, Fred walked along the front line of the marathon and people who didn't look like they were very good runners, he would just push them to the back. I'm talking about guys with basketball shoes who might've weighed 240 pounds, and Fred would say, " You don't belong up here in the front." And he would pull the better runners to make sure they were in the front row. And of course, no chips back then. Everyone's time was from the starter's gun. And I remembered it as thinking this is a bigger deal than I thought it would ever be. There were helicopters overhead, the tugboats were spraying water. Looking down from the Verrazano Bridge, it was like a big- time event even in year one. And by the time we crossed the bridge into Brooklyn and all of a sudden there are people on the sidewalks, both sides, and it was like, this thing's going to work. Yep. 00:16:58 Rebbeca Gentry: I love that. And I love the shock. What do you say? There were people on the sidewalks and now today it's just expected. And I think- 00:17:05 George Hirsch: Now it's unbelievable. 00:17:06 Rebbeca Gentry: We say in whatever city you're running a marathon, whether it's New York, whether it's Boston, people are expected to come out. If somebody tells me they're in New York or Boston when the marathons on and they're not cheering, I'm like, " I'm good. Don't need to talk to you anymore." But let's go back to, we were just talking before we came on stage about the course changes. And so it went from laps of Central Park, by the way, you're all welcome that that is not the case anymore. And then you told us about how there was a very fun moment where the course just popped into the Bronx and I want you to share with everybody the story about that because it was magnificent. 00:17:53 George Hirsch: Yeah. So the very first year there was a five borough marathon. It was essential that the course at least got into all five boroughs and it crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge, which a lot of you know now, and at the 20- mile mark, it ran around a lamppost in the Bronx. It entered the Bronx for, I don't know, 20 or 50 yards, and that was it. And those of us who were running the race that first year, we grabbed the lamppost and spun ourselves around. I see a gentleman nodding. He remembered. And all of a sudden we're running back against those who were still coming behind us. And the first winner

of the race who went on to win this race the first four times, Bill Rodgers had opened up a sizable lead on Frank Shorter, the other big champion of the day. And as Bill was running back now toward the city, he passed Frank and Frank knew that Bill was going to win the race, and he said, " Congratulations Bill." As they passed each other. And at that point, the torch in marathon running was passed. The first five years or so of the 1970s, the top marathon runner in the world was Frank Shorter. And from that day in the New York City Marathon, the top runner in the world became Bill Rodgers. He won New York four times as I said, he went on to win Boston four times. So it was at that moment after the lamppost in the Bronx that the course changed. We opened up more distance in the Bronx thereafter. Yeah. 00:20:06 Rebbeca Gentry: I don't know about anyone who's run the marathon before, but that visual in my mind of those two running legends, just sort of Frank Sinatra style, holding onto a lamppost, going around the corner and getting on with their marathon for another six or so miles was absolutely phenomenal. And that Willis Avenue Bridge, that was one of my personal darkest moments of the New York City Marathon because I think where it is in the race, where it is now, the distance wise, I was solo and it was very dark. So I wish I'd have had that thought in my mind. And even if it wasn't the same lamppost for all of you who are about to run it now, when you go into the Bronx and you see a lamppost and you're in the pain of the 20 miles, just laugh. Just have that image in your mind of these two amazing runners just grabbing the lamppost, just that's going to help you get through. So thank you. 00:20:54 George Hirsch: A further answer to your question is there was one other course change, and that was from the first year to the second year. 00:21:03 Rebbeca Gentry: This blew my mind, everyone. Are you ready? 00:21:05 George Hirsch: Very first year, the race when it crossed into Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge, it immediately went over to the little path along the FDR Drive between the FDR Drive and the river. And of course, there weren't many runners and they were spread out, but there were no spectators of course. And it didn't take long for Fred Lebow and the organizers to figure out that this race had to come up First Avenue. So year two, they changed the course. And as those of you who run the course know, it's the most intense part of the race from a crowd perspective, that 60th Street

on up to 90th Street on First Avenue is just, it's just a wall of sound now, but it was dead quiet in year one and that had to be changed. 00:22:08 Rebbeca Gentry: Wow. 00:22:08 Rob Simmelkjaer: I can't imagine that's a narrow path you're talking about going up the East River. So yes, that's a big change. That was a most necessary change. George, since I've been here and gotten to know you, one thing I know is how important the history is of the marathon to you. You really believe that this history needs to be preserved. You do such a great job of telling these stories. You stayed very close with a lot of these runners from the early days that we talk about the Frank Shorter's and the Bill Rodgers. And now, our winners now are big stars. They're making pretty big money. They're fedded all over the city. They're on late night television when they win our races. But you told me some stories about back then, a guy would win or finish in the top three of the race and might not even have a cab fare to get home necessarily after the race. You talked about you and one of the top runners back during those years having a moment like that. 00:23:09 George Hirsch: The sport was amateur then, and that meant if you received money as an elite runner, you could not participate in the Olympic Games. So I'll tell you, it's no longer a secret, but I can tell you now, I negotiated with both Shorter and to Rodgers in 1976 to get under the table payments in an envelope cash, $ 2, 000 each. And it was sort of done back then, but no one was supposed to have known about it. And needless to say, a runner couldn't earn a living. They had to have a line of running clothes or have a running store or something like that, but it wasn't a profession. 00:24:04 Rebbeca Gentry: Wow. How much has changed? That leads me into, we've talked a lot about other people and running and you have been involved in running for six decades. 00:24:16 George Hirsch: Yeah. 00:24:16 Rebbeca Gentry: About right? 00:24:17 George Hirsch: That's fair. That's fair. 00:24:18 Rebbeca Gentry: Rob said you've run 40 marathons. Your PR at age 44 was 2: 38? 00:24:26 George Hirsch: All correct. 00:24:28 Rebbeca Gentry: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Round of applause for that 2:38 at age 44. 00:24:32 Rob Simmelkjaer: Just stopped for a moment, right? I mean, that's just incredible. 00:24:35 Rebbeca Gentry: Unreal. 00:24:36 Rob Simmelkjaer: That's a legitimately fast time at age 44. 00:24:40 Rebbeca Gentry: Yes, before super shoes and before GPS watches and all of the other stuff that seems to have all of the gels and nutrition- 00:24:48 George Hirsch: We didn't know anything. 00:24:50 Rebbeca Gentry: Exactly. Well, you clearly knew a lot more than you're letting on, but I want to know George. I'm somebody who wants to run until the day I am no longer on this planet, and that's how I train. I train for longevity. How have you done it? I know you're not running, I know you promised your wife at 75, that that would be your last one, but you ran for so long and you enjoyed it. So can you share with us what it is about running that kept the spark there for you? 00:25:20 George Hirsch: Yeah, I guess first off, I've been pretty lucky in that I haven't had major, I've had injuries, running injuries like all of us, but I haven't had any that have been really serious. So I've been extremely lucky and I enjoy fitness. I still do. I haven't run today, but I hope to later today at least to put a few miles on the treadmill. And in more recent years, I've been mixing up my training and doing a little more cross- training. As Rob knows, a few months ago, I started boxing and I'm really enjoying it because the old days, I never did enough upper body work. And boxing is great for your shoulders and working the big bag and the speed bag and you get a great workout. 00:26:22 Rebbeca Gentry: Yeah, you do. I used to do boxing so I know. I feel- 00:26:24 George Hirsch: Oh you know. 00:26:25 Rebbeca Gentry: Yeah. And it's great for the cardio. You obviously have years of cardio, so it must be... But you don't seem like somebody who gets stressed easily, but I'm sure it helps let out some of the stresses on that bag. 00:26:37 George Hirsch: I think fitness helps us in all of that. I try not to overly stress on stuff because life is life and when you get to my age, you learn you can normally turn the page and move on. Yeah. 00:26:54 Rob Simmelkjaer: I remember last summer when I got injured, I was trying to run the Chicago Marathon, my knees started bothering me and it was so funny telling George, " Well, George, I wanted to run this marathon but my knee hurts. I'm not going to make it. I can't do it." I'm talking to George who's run 40 marathons, he's 80- something years old, and he's looking at me like, " Really, Rob? I think you can probably figure it out. You'll recover, you'll get better." And I wasn't really sure at the time, but sure enough, a year later I kept running and did feel better and was able to run in Berlin. What advice do you have for people to keep going and have that kind of longevity in the sport? Because you

hear people all the time saying, " Oh, my knees, my hip, my whatever. I had to stop running" and you're someone who never stopped running really. 00:27:47 George Hirsch: Yeah. And listen, Rob ran Berlin and he ran a PR of 3: 27 a few weeks ago, so he's still improving. And he's a perfect example when he gets to be my age, he's going to be doing it for sure. What is the advice? I think the advice is, it's like a marathon. We can't say how important a taper is. And maybe in all of the cycle of the year, you've got to do some downtime. We're all busy and don't try to push yourself through it. Our work situations can be very demanding and maybe you say to yourself, " I'm not going to run this marathon this year" or " I'm just going to pass." And take the long view would be my be my basic advice and you'll hold up much better. 00:28:58 Rebbeca Gentry: That's beautiful advice and something that I am going to quote you on that because at Peloton I say that a lot to runners, unless you are an Olympian, who is getting paid the big bucks as we know, it's our hobby and our hobbies should be what make us happy and it shouldn't be stressful. We shouldn't be forcing ourselves to get out there for the run. If it works, beautiful. If it doesn't, it's tomorrow. There's always tomorrow. So I selfishly want to know a little bit about your relationship with one of my idols, a female runner who has inspired me a huge amount, and that is Joan, Joan Benoit Samuelson. I think we all know first woman to win, what? 1984 she won. And you've run a lot of miles with Joan, you've run a lot of marathons. A very specific marathon, you ran more or less alongside her all the way. What is your relationship like- 00:29:53 George Hirsch: I wish it were all way, but yes it's true. It the 1979 Boston Marathon, I started off and maybe, and I was talking to a woman at the start, not Joan, and she was telling me what she was hoping to do that day, and I gave her the standard Boston advice that it's all downhill in the beginning, so let's go very easy. And probably a minute or two into the race, this other woman comes up alongside of us and she's like a kid. She was a college student at the time, Joan Benoit. And we all introduced ourselves, this is Sue, this is Joan. I'm George. Joni and I knew who each other were a little bit. And we started running together. And I remembered at a certain point our friend Sue dropped back. And as we're heading into Wellesley, we keep hearing second woman, you're the second woman. Now listen,

that was pretty heady for me to think that I was the second woman in the Boston Marathon. It was extraordinary. And up ahead of us was America's then best marathon runner who won this award last year, Patti Catalano Lyons and Patti Lyons Catalano. And she was the first American woman to ever break 2: 30 in the marathon. She was the real deal. And we didn't see her, but we kept hearing, " Second woman, Patti's up ahead, Patti's up ahead." And as we were going into Wellesley, I remembered saying to Joni, " It's going to get really noisy because all these college women come out and they go crazy for the first women in the race." I said, " It's going to get really noisy. So let me tell you something. I came through here last year with Miki. It was a woman named Miki Gorman, and you and I are on faster pace today, and she won the race." And Joni looked up at me and she said, " George, you made my day." I'll never forget it. And it was a chilly sort of rainy day. And after we got through the halfway and we started heading into the hills, she took off. She had a long sleeve shirt and she whipped it off and tossed it aside as if to say, now it's time to let's get going. And she left me in the hills and off she went. And I remembered we were getting into Boston and I was really not processing mentally where I was and I was getting depressed and you know the bad patches you go through in a marathon. And all of a sudden, my now dear friend Sue comes back up and tells what is of course the greatest lie that we all tell each other, " George, you're looking great." And we all hear that. We all yell it out a thousand times on Sunday and you want to believe it. And back then, people line the course with transistor radios. And now we're hearing that Bill Rodgers won the Boston Marathon, which he always did. And then we're hearing Joan Benoit has just passed Patty Catalano and Sue and I are bumping our fists. And this is really crazy because Patty was a real friend of mine and I've known Joan for an hour and a half. But somehow or other you run a race or part of it, you know what I mean? You run part of a race with someone and you're in it together. And it was like, " Go Joan." And Joan passed. And I remember we came down into the finish shoot and there was Joan and she had a wreath on her head and Sue and I finished together and the three of us were hugging. And as I wrote in a piece that I wrote in Runner's World right after that, I said, " And there we were the first, third and fourth women in the Boston Marathon." 00:34:58 Rob Simmelkjaer: That's a great story. Love that story. 00:34:58 Rebbeca Gentry: I love that. And I am going to be asking you to find some photos of that as well. 00:35:10 Rob Simmelkjaer: Unbelievable and exemplary of where you've been. You're almost like Forrest Gump in a way of running. You've been in so many places, in so many rooms and races and connected with so many of the greats of the sport that you really have seen it all through your own eyes. And you mentioned writing and the role that you as a journalist have played in sport. We have a journalism award at New York Road Runners, we just gave it out yesterday at our media luncheon to a gentleman named Chris Chavez who was this year's recipient. He's the editor of Cityist Magazine. Many of us know him. And that award is named after George Hirsch. And it's because of your contributions as a journalist to this sport running Runner's World Magazine, all the things you did really put running in the mainstream of society. And I'm just curious now, George, you talked about that running boom of the seventies. How do you think running has stayed culturally relevant all these years? And what do you think about what's going on now? Because we have a running boom of our own happening now, as you can see looking around our expo, as you can see from the fact that our races are all sold out in New York. What do you think is behind running, staying relevant, and continuing to grow in its popularity? 00:36:37 George Hirsch: I think right now we are in the third running boom, and I think it's bigger than either of the ones that came before. I truly believe it. I think there's a few catalysts for it. The pandemic obviously caused an awful lot of people who were forced to stay at home. They couldn't go to work, they couldn't get out of their house to do much, but they could go out and run and boy did they. And we're getting more entries, not just for the marathon, but for all of the roughly 40 to 50 events that we put on each year. They're all sold out now. The demand is huge. And also, I think the other thing that has totally transformed the sport, you mentioned Joni, she was a pioneer is and Kathrine Switzer, who's going to be here later today, women in the sport, that first five borough marathon when I said there were 2000 people, 100 were women. Now we're seeing at our races often 50/50 and sometimes even more women than men. That's just driven this sport and I think it's huge. I think this sport even has a long way to go. And

it's not just a sport, it's an activity. It's a way of life and it's a lifestyle. And I think that's what's important. And then people like Galloway, the Galloway method, he came along and he gave us permission to do some walking during a marathon. That was unheard of when I talked about 1969 and 1970s. No one would dare stop and walk. Now you can incorporate it into really quite a respectable marathon, walking a minute every five minutes or every mile or whatever your Galloway program is. So I think all of these things have made running more accessible. And the more people see, there'll be maybe two million people on the streets out there on Sunday. And a lot of them are going to say, " I could do that maybe next year." 00:39:26 Rob Simmelkjaer: That's absolutely right. And you nailed it. I talk about that all the time. The way this sport has grown, what's been driving it and the role of women, no question about it. And one story that I have to ask you to talk about, there's no interview with you, George is complete without talking about a very special woman to you in your life and your late wife, Shay. And Shay, of course, if you know George, and you've known George for a long time, you know how important Shay was in your life and she was a runner. You met her at a race. That's my understanding. And so running has been such a big part of your life and perhaps no more so than the day you met Shay. 00:40:16 George Hirsch: Well, thank you for that. My wife Shay passed away 10 years ago, and I think about her every day. So back in 1988, I was asked by NBC to do commentary for the Olympic Games, which I had done in '84 and subsequently in Barcelona in '80, in '92. And the Olympic trials for the men's marathon was held at the New Jersey Waterfront Marathon in conjunction with the people's race. So to do my homework, my job then I was publisher of Runner's World, but I was doing commentary for the games in Seoul, Korea. And so I went out to the marathon the day before Standard Expo. This is what it was. It wasn't this big, it was a much smaller race. But you know the routine, there were seminars not on like this. And I was standing at the Runner's World booth and this woman walked by and she had this beautiful smile and blue eyes and dark hair. And I just took a look at her and it was palpable. And she kept walking so I followed her. And I came up to her and I just said, " Hi, how are you?" And she said to me, " Are you George Hirsch?" And I would've said yes under any circumstances at

that point. And she said, " You did me a favor and I want to thank you for it." And I said, " Well, what was that?" And she said, " Well, some months ago, a friend of mine asked you to send a training program from Runner's World Magazine to me because I'm training and tomorrow I'm running my first marathon." You have to remember, there were no online, there was nothing. So it was something that I had put in the mail and it wasn't an unusual request and I hadn't given it a lot of thought. I remembered the friend who requested it, didn't know who I sent it to. And I said, " Well, great. What are you looking for?" And she said, " Well... Like every one of you who runs your first marathon... " Well just to finish." And then she said, But you know, I wouldn't mind coming back and running the New York City Marathon this fall and seeing if I could qualify for Boston." I said, " What do you need?" She said, " Well, I just turned 40 and I need 3: 40." And I said, " Well, how would you like to have dinner with me tonight?" And she said, " Well, thank you but no." So I wanted to prolong the conversation. So I walked her out to her car at the race headquarters hotel out there and kept the conversation going. Next morning, I have a big breakfast with friends and so on. And I go to the race and the elite runners, the Olympic marathon trials started 15 minutes before the people's race and I'm there for that. And I have to confess, I had lost all interest in that. And they start, and I walk into this sea of, I think it was 3, 500 people. And you know what it's like. There was no way I was going to find her. And the gun goes off. And I waited until every last person crossed the starting line, and I started to jog, looking to my left, looking to my right, looking, looking, looking. Finally, at five miles, there she is, she's up ahead of me. She's listening to her tunes. And I came up alongside of her, Rob, and I'm trying to be super cool, and I said, " Hi." And she said, " What are you doing here?" And I said, " Well, actually, I was looking for you." And we started... I have to tell you this. It was a period for a number of reasons, including I remembered a broken shoulder that I had. I hadn't run a marathon for four years. Anyway, we start running together and then the next thing you know, it's life stories and we're talking and we get to, I don't know, 23, 24 miles. She says, " I'm really getting tired." And I said, " Well, welcome to the marathon. This is what you're supposed to be." And we went quiet. 3 hours, 37 minutes and one second later, she crosses the finish line. I step aside because I don't have a number. And off she goes, by now she knew where I worked or whatever. And so I got to work early the next day, which I used to do. I don't anymore. And the phone rang and she said, " I just calling to thank you because now I'm qualified for the Boston Marathon thanks to you. Is there any chance I could take you to lunch this weekend? Any chance?" And anyway, it was a little more complicated after that. And she was moving from New Jersey back to Idaho where she lived, and it took a while but the next year we got married. So that's it. 00:46:46 Rebbeca Gentry: Yeah. The joys of being a race director to chase your love. 00:46:54 Rob Simmelkjaer: Absolutely. Still, I've heard it from you a number of times. I haven't heard a better love story then that in a race. And I think it really sums up the role running has had in your life. And of course, you've had an incredible role in the life of running and the growth of running. And our organization here at New York Road Runners, our event here at the TCS New York Center Marathon, George, congratulations again on this award today. Such a privilege to present it to you. So great to have you here on Set The Pace, you have your own podcast by the, which we should tell people about. 00:47:30 George Hirsch: Yeah, with Amby Burfoot, it's called Running: State of the Sport. And I'm often on the same side that Becs and Rob are on and it's fun doing this. 00:47:44 Rob Simmelkjaer: Yep, it really is. You do a great job. George, thank you so much for being with us. Congratulations. Thank you for everything you've done for New York Road Runners, for the TCS New York City Marathon, and we will see you soon. Thank you very much. 00:48:01 George Hirsch: Thank you. And thanks Becs, and thanks Rob. I'm honored to be on your program. 00:48:07 Rob Simmelkjaer: Thank you. All right, well this has been amazing. Now, for those here live with us, we're going to take a 15- minute break. Gabby Thomas is in the building. I have seen Gabby. She's backstage. 00:48:18 Rebbeca Gentry: Go and tell everyone else in the expo. 00:48:20 Rob Simmelkjaer: We'll be out in a moment. Olympic gold medalist Gabby Thomas will be back on stage with us in just a couple of minutes. For those online, thanks for listening. You can just find the next episode because it's going to be right after this one on Set the Pace. Thank you for joining us. 00:48:35 Speaker 3: Growing a business means a lot of audience attracting, a lot of lead scoring, and a lot of lot long days. But with HubSpot, it's easier than ever for marketers to boost leads and score customers fast, which means pretty soon your company will have a lot to celebrate. Visit hubspot. com/ marketers to learn more.