From the frigging Times (remember, when it's good, it's pretty Goddam good*):
Forty minutes before the start of the New York Marathon, Victor Navarra has always been in the same place, perched in the bucket of a rescue truck, surveying the starting line and sending down orders from 85 feet in the air.(*It's just that it's rarer and rarer....)
“It’s like being God for a day,” said Navarra, 55, a retired Fire Department lieutenant who has coordinated the start of the race for 25 years. “I say something on the radio and it just happens.”
Each year, as the runners inched toward the race’s three starting lines, Navarra made last-minute adjustments so that the field, now numbering about 40,000, could safely leave Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island and set off across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Now, in the buildup to his 26th New York City Marathon, Navarra’s biggest challenge will not be making sure that instructions to the runners are broadcast in seven languages or that 28,000 cups of coffee are ready for them. It will be living long enough to attend this year’s race.
He was diagnosed in 2005 as having malignant tumors next to his sinuses, a condition he attributes to volunteering at ground zero in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In April of this year, Navarra said his doctors estimated he had three months to live after multiple operations to remove the tumors failed to eliminate the cancer. In July, he gathered his wife, two daughters and two grandchildren to celebrate Christmas early. By then, he had already planned his funeral. And last week, even though the tumors have taken away his eyesight, he was on conference calls with the New York Road Runners, going over minute details for the start of the Nov. 4 race.
“His faculties aren’t failing him when it comes to the marathon,” said Mary Wittenberg, the director of the marathon. “It’s been a rock for him as much as he’s been a rock for us.”
The mutual dependency is not lost on Navarra.
“I’m not a doctor, but the fact that I have a reason to get up keeps me going,” he said. “I wake up every day and I say: ‘I’m alive. That’s a good start.’”
Although he can barely stand and a tumor the size of an orange inside his mouth has impaired his speech, he still tells stories about the races he has seen since he began volunteering with the New York Marathon in 1976.
“The setup at the start was about six card tables,” Navarra said. “We’d cut a hole in the fence and send the runners onto the bridge with arrows painted on pieces of wood to tell them where to go.”
As the race grew from 2,000 runners to nearly 20 times that, he learned to innovate and is now credited with inventing the modern method to kick off a major marathon.
Now, on race day, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is closed to traffic shortly after midnight, leaving the organizers barely enough time to set up three separate starting corrals, each with its own athlete village that includes food, massage tents and the world’s longest urinal (285 feet). “You can make a mistake once,” Navarra said of setting up. “But you don’t do it again.”
Those six hours, between the time the bridge is closed and the time runners begin arriving at Fort Wadsworth, require a year of preparation. At every turn, Navarra said, a dozen things can and do go wrong. “I love challenges,” Navarra said. “If nothing went wrong, it would boring.”
He recalled the time, in 1993, when Mayor David N. Dinkins came to the start to watch the race’s founder, Fred Lebow, who was then dying of cancer, begin his last marathon. According to Navarra, Dinkins wanted a photograph of himself pretending to start the race.
“So, with 52 seconds to go before the start,” Navarra said, “Dinkins raises the air horn for the picture. All the cops saw this and they got nervous. The motorcycles start moving and adios. The runners started going out.”
It was his worst marathon moment. “When you work the whole year for that one second and lose it, I bawled my eyes out,” he said.
Navarra and Joanne, his wife of 37 years, have worked as a team to organize races throughout the country. But as much as Navarra enjoys the smaller events — he once did 22 in one year — New York is closest to his heart. That is why in 25 years, the marathon has become an afterthought to Navarra only once — on Sept. 11, 2001.
After 21 years of serving in the city’s Fire Department, Navarra had been retired for four years. “I got my family together, hugged them and made sure they were O.K.,” he said. “The next thing I had to do was go to the firehouse because I needed to know that I didn’t stay home and watch television. I had to do something for my brothers.”
His firehouse, Engine 40 and Ladder 35 at 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was one of the hardest hit. Twenty-six men from the firehouse where he spent 11 years as a lieutenant set out that morning. Thirteen did not return.
“That’s my other family,” Navarra said. “I can never look through the list without falling apart. I can’t deal with it.”
On Sept. 12, Navarra was back in his fire gear and working the bucket brigades at ground zero, clearing debris and looking for survivors.
“Over the course of the next few weeks, I basically lived there, doing all sorts of things,” he said in his living room in Staten Island. “When I arrived, it was bedlam.”
Whether he was searching for his friends at ground zero or dealing with the countless donations that poured into the station, he tried not to let a second go to waste. He knew he also had a job to do for the marathon, which was only weeks away. Sleeping two or three hours a night, Navarra coordinated the start, and on the day of the race, with F-16s circling overhead and snipers on every roof, he was perched above Fort Wadsworth to make sure it went off without a hitch.
Navarra said he was convinced his exposure to ground zero’s noxious fumes and sweltering heat caused the cancer that left him blind and unable to walk.
He said he had been receiving regular examinations from the department’s 9/11 medical monitoring program and that commission doctors certified his condition as affected by the toxins at the site. For privacy reasons, Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said he could not discuss or confirm medical records. Officials at the Uniformed Firefighters Association said they did not have access to medical records.
“I know I’m not going to live,” Navarra said. “How long I have, I don’t know. But I know that I’m never going to see my granddaughter get married.”
Still, Navarra has made a career of planning ahead, and he does not think now is a time to stop. He has already started thinking about the 2008 race. And even though he will probably not be there, his wife will continue the family tradition, hovering 85 feet above 40,000 runners.
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