Runners happy that Long Island Marathon has returned to its regular time of year

Another domino on the road to relative normalcy will fall Sunday morning, just about 90 minutes after sunrise. The Long Island Marathon is back on its traditional weekend after two years of pandemic-altered racing.

On the first day of May, under predicted sunny skies, an estimated 2,500 runners will resume the annual early-May tradition of leaving Eisenhower Park in East Meadow on foot and returning 26.2-miles later, worn and tired but accomplished and happy.

“It’s a great weekend to do the marathon,” said Corey Roberts, the race director at Race Awesome, the company that organizes the event.

The 2020 Long Island Marathon was cancelled, at least the ‘event’ portion of it, due to the pandemic. Runners were welcome to compete virtually, that is run the traditional distance on their own and enter their time online. But that just wasn’t the same.

The 2021 marathon was moved from May to mid-September, when it was competed on a very warm day — certainly not ideal for distance running. Roberts said that keeping the marathon in September was never considered, partly because of the heat. ‘

“We were always going back to May,” Roberts said. “It’s pretty hot to run a marathon in September.”

Half-marathoner Joe Pecora said he was a little leery about highly-populated activity during the heart of the pandemic, but now feels comfortable and excited about running in a big event again.

“This is the time to come out and get together,” said Pecora, 47, of Wantagh. “I know there’s been spikes in COVID. I’m vaxxed and boosted. I’m in good health and I think myself, and everyone else, wants  to get out and be with people again. I’ve been running on my own and in a small group…There’s nothing like the energy on race day. It’s such a people event. That energy that you feel on race day is hard to match.” 

Syosset’s Rebecca Margolin won the women’s marathon in September, finishing in 3 hours, 30 minutes, 14.9 seconds, the first marathon victory of her running life, which she said began after high school. Still recovering from an injury, Margolin will not be running on Sunday, but her father, Gary, will be running in his ninth full marathon.  

“I’m happy that it’s back on the traditional weekend because I’m happy that a lot of things are getting back closer to normal,” said Margolin, 62, of Syosset. “I’ve been running almost only the half [marathon] since 2001. It’s always been the first Sunday in May. Like everything else in the world, it changed and was kind of a bummer that it wasn’t held last May or the May before.”

Margolin said he usually runs the half marathon, but chose the full this year because he needs a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon, which can be gotten at the Long Island Marathon. He ran the Boston Marathon last October — another race that was moved from it’s traditional spring spot — but suffered a hamstring injury five days before, making it a rather arduous run.

“That was terrible,” he said. “I feel much better right now than I did a couple days before [last fall’s] the Boston Marathon.”

Roberts said registration for this year’s event is about the same as last September’s.

“We’re very happy with it, based on the fact that so many events have started back up this year,” Roberts said.