The Runners Arrive in New York City!

A slight change of plans: Hebrew is deferred just until November 7, so I can focus on German, Spanish, French, and Italian for New York City Marathon week.

Welcome to the ING New York City Marathon!

Since October 1, I have been trying to revive the deceased Italian in my brain to prepare for my volunteer duties at the NYC Marathon Expo, where thousands of runners from around the world come to register for the pleasure of being allowed to run 26.2 miles on Sunday through the five boroughs that make up New York City: Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

I personally have run five marathons, four of them in New York, but it has been many years since the last one, and there is no marathon in my immediate future. To be honest, I find marathons a little…long.

But it is great fun to see so many happy, excited people, some of whom have traveled really, really far to run really, really far!

The marathon expo takes place over several days at the Javits Center, near the Hudson River in the 30s. My duty today was to check IDs as people entered the expo. This happens to be one of the few marathon volunteer tasks where you can actually sit (which I needed to be able to do for my injured foot), and I was there from about 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

They give you little stickers to put on your volunteer T-shirt indicating the languages you can help out with. Except for the Spanish sticker, which had the word “Español” on it, my stickers were national flags. I am extremely lame at remembering and recognizing flags. It is a glaring deficiency. Kind of embarrassing. 

Benefiting from some remedial flag help, I ended up with four stickers, for Spanish, German, Italian, and French. I stuck them to myself. Two of my flags then remained backwards until better-informed people came along and pointed out the mistake.

View Into the Expo from My Booth

Now, I am terribly sorry to disappoint people who are expecting that I will be adept in 11 languages by this point and should therefore have been wearing 11 stickers, but that is just not the case. The non-European, more unfamiliar languages I simply don’t get as far in to begin with, and they largely go to sleep (some go completely to sleep, in fact) when I stop studying them. 

The Western European ones are the only ones in which I am currently conversational (and for Italian, that had ceased to be true until I did my review over the past month). I am no language savant, though if you want to read about some of those remarkable human beings, you should get Michael Erard’s book Babel No More when it comes out in January. 

Back to the marathon: there are a number of ID check booths, all fed by a sometimes major river of arriving people. So, the deal is, the runners come at you thick and fast with their IDs and their registration sheets for the marathon. You check each person’s ID and registration sheet, make sure those things correspond to each other and to the person standing before you, and you stamp the registration sheet. You tell the people where to go to get their race bibs. There is friendly small talk while this happens.

Today there was apparently a dearth of Italian speakers volunteering at the expo, and the Italian runners and accompanying friends and relatives seemed pretty happy to find someone who could communicate with them. I am so glad I studied up!

I’m not making any grand claims of sophistication in Italian, but what I had in my head was totally sufficient for small-talk, identification-check kinds of activities. And good enough to make jokes and tease in, which as I believe I have mentioned previously, is to me one of the most important signs that one has meaningful skills in a given language.

I even helped reunite an Italian man who didn’t speak any English with his lost cell phone!

Marathon Volunteer Chic

Having people come at me all afternoon from countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain is absolutely 100 percent my idea of fun! I thought jumping around so much from one language to the next might hurt my head, or I might get hopelessly confused, but it was more like a caress to the brain. An energizing caress. It felt fantastic. People who didn’t speak English well, or at all, were happy to get help in their languages, and I was ecstatic to practice on them.

I did this project for multiple reasons. One was to try some radically unfamiliar languages—and I have loved that piece of the experience, even when I have struggled. I wish I could learn faster and remember more, but even just being able to read Greek letters on a Greek passport today was rewarding.

Still, to actually use what you have learned with real live people, and to remember bucketloads of what you have forgotten from way back when you were in school, and to see these skills actually work with people who are standing in front of you excited about something and/or in need of help and/or just inclined to shoot the shit, well, that is an amazingly unbelievably fabulous feeling.

I have never done anything in my life like what I did today, and it is a most fantastic fantasy come true!

Going back for more tomorrow…