Ready, set, run! Suffolk marathoners hit road

Cloudy and cool weather greeted the nearly 2,000 runners who stepped off Sunday morning at the starting line in the Village of Babylon for the Suffolk County Marathon and shorter races.

The new 26.2-mile course for the eighth annual marathon traversed the Robert Moses Causeway and ended in Gardiner County Park in Bay Shore. The race, which began in 2015, had raised about $800,000 for Long Island veterans programs as of May, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said earlier this year.

The marathon, previously held in Patchogue, was hosted in a virtual form without crowds in 2020. This year, the event also included a 5-kilometer family run and a 1-kilometer kids fun run on Saturday.

Fred Freutel, 71, of Valley Stream, and his crew ran in honor of Marine Cpl. Chris Scherer of East Northport, who was killed by an enemy sniper in Iraq in 2007. Freutel said he has run “quite a few marathons” in his day but still felt prerace jitters in anticipation of the start. That all goes away “once we get going,” he said.

The number one X-factor in any marathon, the weather, worked out nicely on Sunday, with the temperature near 60 degrees and cloud cover providing perfect conditions.

“The weather held up,” said Elena Taylor, 43, of Dix Hills who ran her seventh marathon. “It wasn’t too hot, it wasn’t too sunny, it was perfect.”

After she caught her breath and fueled up in the post-race snack tent, she said the day’s agenda called for rest and maybe a showing of the "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" movie with her kids.

The majority of the runners on Sunday ran the 13.1-mile half-marathon course which had more than 1,000 participants. A few hundred took on the full marathon, while a few hundred others ran a 10K.

Some of the 26.2-mile marathon runners like Hideyuki Ishii, 56, of Forest Hills, Queens opted for the Long Island race because they couldn’t secure a spot in the annual New York City Marathon set for Nov. 6.

“I didn’t win the lottery,” he said of trying to enter the five-borough race for which slots can be highly competitive.

Still, he said he enjoyed the flat Long Island course and its views, even if he said it was a bit windy.

Spectators like Alicia Berbenick know a cheering crowd can make all the difference when runners are putting their endurance to the limit.

Berbenick, 38, of Brooklyn held a sign displaying the lyrics of the 1985 Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," which recently gained renewed popularity after it was featured on the Netflix series “Stranger Things.”

She hoped the words “Keep running up that road, running up that hill, running up that building” would give an extra oomph to her sister Ashley Berbenick of Smithtown, and cousin Jen Labansky of Babylon if they needed it while making their way through the race.

“As a former runner I know exactly how hard it is,” she said. “It’s a little extra support to maybe even get them running up that building.”

By Vera Chinese

vera.chinese@newsday.com@VeraChinese

Vera Chinese joined Newsday in 2017 after working as an editor for the East End lifestyle publication northforker and a general assignment reporter for the New York Daily News.