At around mile 24 in the 2004 Marine Corps Marathon, George Banker ran out of steam along Route 110 in Arlington.
“The cramps hit me so bad, I was leaning up against the guardrails,” the Oxon Hill resident said.
An Arlington police officer asked him whether he needed to get on the bus that patrols the 26.2-mile race and offers respite for runners who can’t finish. But Banker refused.
“ ‘I’m not gettin’ in nobody’s bus,’ ” he remembered saying. “ ‘I don’t care if I have to crawl. I’m going to get to that finish line.’ ”
Banker, 58, who literally wrote the book on the race — “The Marine Corps Marathon: A Running Tradition,” published in 2007 — and a retired member of the Air Force, did finish that year, and has run in the MCM 24 other times. He first ran in 1983, skipping the event in 1986 only because the New York City Marathon fell on the same weekend.
“At that point in the race, you basically join the walking wounded,” he said. “Once you hit that [end chute], you have to pull it all together.
“Then, once you hit the finish line, all the pain goes away.”
Col. Jim Fowler floated the idea for the race in a memo to Gen. Michael Ryan on Oct. 17, 1975, pitching the idea of a Marine Corps Reserve Marathon as a way to foster community good will and provide local Marines a chance to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
The first Reserve Marathon in November 1976 hosted 1,175 runners and, since then, has developed into a tour de force. The approximately 30,000 spots for this year’s race were filled just five days after registration opened in April.
The race, which starts and ends at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, is now the fourth-largest marathon in the country, behind New York, Boston and Hawaii, and the largest not to offer prize money, earning it the unofficial moniker of “The People’s Marathon.”
Because of runners dropping out for reasons such as injuries and scheduling conflicts, 26,015 people were scheduled to run as of Wednesday, according to race spokeswoman Beth Johnson. She said that would translate to about 21,000 runners on the starting line.
“I don’t even think Colonel Fowler — nobody ever thought that this event would reach the level that it’s had,” Banker said. “People go and have a very good experience from it. They don’t forget it.”
Rep. Robert J. Wittman, R-Va., will fire the pistol at 8 a.m. Sunday to officially start the 33rd installment of the race.
“That’s a big responsibility,” he said, adding it was a “tremendous honor” and he was humbled to be “part of a great tradition.”
Also part of the tradition are the four “Groundpounders,” the nickname for the four men who have run in every MCM since its inception in 1976 — Will Brown, 62, of Raleigh, N.C.; Matthew Jaffe, 67, of Rockville; Alfred Richmond, 69, of Arlington; and Mel Williams, 70, of Norfolk.
Banker — tantalizingly close to being a member — says it’s a prestigious group.
“Nobody wants to drop out of that club,” he said. “They just fell into it. This club got started, and nobody wants to drop out of it.
“Nobody owns the marathon,” he continued. “Nobody owns it. It’s just who’s on that day.”
Kristen Henehan of Silver Spring, an All-American runner in Georgetown’s class of 2001, was certainly on last year, as she won the women’s title — in her first marathon, no less — with a time of 2:51:14.
She didn’t begin her training until July, and had the relatively conservative goal — for someone with her pedigree — of running the race in three hours.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I could break three hours,’ ” she said. “I didn’t realize how much I missed the competition until I started training for the Marine Corps Marathon.”
By race day, she was a bit less enthusiastic.
“To be honest, I thought, ‘Why did I think this would be a good idea?’ ” she said, laughing. “I didn’t think it was too bad until about mile 22.”
During the race, heading up a hill on Canal Road, she came across a wheelchair racer, which rekindled her fire.
“If they can do this with just their arms, of course I can do a marathon,” she thought at the time. “[Military service members] are the true champions. What they’re accomplishing is far greater than what people running in the race are doing.”
Still, runners have to push themselves through extreme physical and mental challenges, especially toward the end of the race.
“Everybody tells you that the race doesn’t start until mile 20,” Banker said. “Your mind starts playing tricks on you in the last six. You start testing yourself.
“I get friends who say, ‘Hey, didn’t you see me?’ and I tell them, ‘My mind was talking to you, but my lips wouldn’t move.’ ”
Alisa Harvey, 43, of Manassas, who won the event’s women’s 10-kilometer run in 2006 and 2007 and was the first master woman (40 and older) to finish the marathon in 2005, with a time of 3:10:07, said one of the only things she remembers at the end of her win was being carried from the finish line to the hospitality tent by a Marine.
By the time runners hit the home stretch on Route 110, she said, “people in the race are just bottomed out, and people are cheering each other on. Then it’s the last, final climb up to Iwo Jima. You’re just death. You’re at death’s door. But you gotta make it up there.”
The marathon is unique in that about half of the 3,000 volunteers are active-duty Marines and sailors.
“I just love the event because I love seeing Marines out there, handing out water,” Harvey said. “It instills you with a sense of national pride.”
Ooh-rah.
