George Hirsch is 75. He is the founding publisher of New York magazine, he ran for Congress in 1986, and he has a personal-best marathon time of 2 hours 38 minutes (Boston, 1979). A founder and publisher of running magazines, Hirsch helped Fred Lebow plan the first five-borough New York City Marathon, in 1976, and is now chairman of the New York Road Runners, the race’s organizer. He has run more than 30 marathons over four decades.On Nov. 1, Hirsch plans to be at the starting line of the New York City Marathon on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. His friends are hoping for the best. Some of them also worry.
“The last few times George has raced marathons, he literally came out looking like a welterweight boxer who had been T.K.O.’d in the eighth round,” said Amby Burfoot, a longtime editor at Runner’s World.
At the Chicago Marathon in 2003, Hirsch, then 69, collapsed 50 yards from the finish and fell on his face. He lost part of two front teeth. At the Mesa Falls Marathon in Idaho in 2007, Hirsch, then 73, fell on his face again. His sunglasses smashed and he was left with a black eye.
Two months later, Hirsch was on pace to run a 3:27 marathon in Albany when he lost his balance running downhill after the 20th mile. He was bleeding, but he picked himself up and took off again. His back soon seized up. Two police officers on bicycles escorted him the rest of the way. He refused their requests to go to a hospital.
Bart Yasso, who has run more than 1,000 races, described Hirsch as the “most mentally tough runner I have ever met.” But in Albany, Hirsch’s wife, Shay, watched her bloodied husband shuffle into the finishers’ gate and decided they should talk.
“I said, ‘This has got to be it, George,’ ” she said. “ ‘You’ve run your marathons. You’ve put it out there and you know what you can do, but this is not good.’ ”
Hirsch is not the only septuagenarian who has found it difficult to give up marathoning. Ed Whitlock, a Canadian athlete, was 73 when he ran a 2:54 marathon; this month, at 78, he ran a 1:37 half-marathon. Last year, 174 finishers of the New York City Marathon were 70 or older, and 15 were in their 80s.
Hirsch, razor thin with a warm smile, had always longed to be good at some athletic endeavor. “I had no natural gifts,” he said.
Growing up in New Rochelle, N.Y., he set up a high-jump pit in his parents’ backyard and spent hours trying to clear the bar, even though “there isn’t a single high-jump gene in there,” Shay Hirsch said. In his 30s, he took up distance running — a sport in which “you can improve a lot just on persistence,” Hirsch said.
His grit served him as well in life as in running. Hirsch built The Runner and Runner’s World into popular magazines that conveyed his enthusiasm and broadened the sport’s appeal. Then, in 1988, Hirsch was working at an exposition for the New Jersey Waterfront Marathon when he met Shay Scrivner, then 40, a brunette with kind eyes.
Hirsch asked her to dinner that night, but she refused. He was so taken with her, however, that he showed up at the starting line the next day — for a race that he never intended to run. He surveyed the crowd but still had not found her when the gun went off.
“I waited for every person to cross the starting line,” Hirsch said. “And then I started to jog. I kept looking left and right, and looking and running and jogging and looking, and at five miles, there she was up ahead of me. I came up next to her and said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ She said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘Looking for you.’ ”
They ran the remaining 21 miles together and shared their life stories, including their failed first marriages, and wed the next year.
Hirsch loves his wife more than running, so when she suggested after the Albany race that it was time to stop doing marathons, he agreed. He even seemed relieved. He e-mailed his close friends, including the four-time Boston and New York City winner Bill Rodgers and the Olympic champions Frank Shorter and Joan Benoit Samuelson.
“I’m retiring from marathoning,” he wrote. “Yes, this time for good. I really do mean it.”
Mary Wittenberg, the president and chief executive of New York Road Runners, remembered receiving that message. “I never accepted or believed that resignation,” she said.
In early August, Hirsch went for a long run and made it 17 miles. He began to see some significance in numbers. It was the year of his 20th wedding anniversary and the 40th running of the New York City Marathon, which he last ran in 1994. As he took longer runs, Shay asked, “Are you training for anything in particular?” He kept saying no.
In September, though, Hirsch told her that he wanted to run one last marathon in New York. She agreed.
Hirsch intended to run only part of the Chicago Marathon this month as his final long training run. He told friends he would go no farther than 20 miles. At Mile 20, he felt good and decided to jog in the last six miles. He finished in 3:58 without injury.
Hirsch’s friends have mobilized to help him through the finish line in New York. Germán Silva, the 1994 and ’95 winner, will run the early miles with Hirsch. Rodgers, who is fighting plantar fasciitis, will run the last few miles with him.
Shorter, the 1972 Olympic champion, said he received a cortisone shot in his damaged left hip so he could join Hirsch and Rodgers. But he realized last week that he would not be healthy enough.
“George is whipping Frank and me,” said Rodgers, who has been friends with Hirsch since 1976. “We’re 15 years younger than him. We’re struggling a little.”
Shay Hirsch will be waiting at the finish. Her husband is running for a charity that benefits research into multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer that she is battling. When she was recovering from a stem-cell transplant three years ago, he rarely left her bedside for months.
“He is very tenacious,” she said. “He doesn’t give up on people, either.”
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