New York City Marathon

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First run on 13 September 1970 as four and a bit laps of Central Park, with 127 entrants paying one dollar each and 55 finishers. Fred Lebow, one of the organisers, finished 45th. In 1976 Lebow got the race out of the park and across the whole city, and the five-borough course has run ever since from Staten Island over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens, over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, over the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx, back over the Madison Avenue Bridge into Manhattan and south to a finish in Central Park. The elevation is not in hills but in bridges: the climbs are short, steep and placed where they hurt most, with the Queensboro at about 25 km and the Willis Avenue at about 32 km. New York is record-eligible — its start and finish are about 20 km apart and its net drop is small — but its profile and its November wind mean the world record has not been set there since the course was found to be short.