Tatyana McFadden has competed in the NYC Marathon since 2010.
The annual TCS New York City Marathon is this Sunday. According to the race’s website, there were 51,453 finishers from 148 countries last year with an average finish time of 4:39:37. The Marathon, which began life in 1970, is produced by the nonprofit New York Road Runners.
The NYC Marathon has a webpage dedicated to so-called athletes with disabilities. Although the natural inclination is to think of a marathon as something done on foot, or by people who are known as ambulatory, the NYC Marathon does have a program for the race that’s inclusive of wheelchair users. I recently sat down with three disabled participants of the NYC Marathon, Tatyana McFadden, Susannah Scaroni, and Daniel Romanchuk, to talk about running in the race, inclusion, and lots more.
As far as accolades are concerned, McFadden arguably is the most decorated of the three. She’s the most decorated United States track and field Paralympian, a 22-time medalist who’s a 24-time major marathon winner. McFadden explained competing in the Paris Paralympic Games was an “honor” and she’s happy to “end the year” competing in marathons like New York City’s. She called the NYC Marathon “the best day” in the city partly because it brings “people from all walks of life together”—disabled people included. The “really cool thing” about running a marathon, McFadden told me, is people do it for all sorts of reasons. For her part, McFadden is a veteran of the NYC Marathon, having run her first in 2010 after beginning marathoning the year prior.
That first race 14 years ago daunted McFadden, as she conceded she didn’t feel like she was “strong enough or powerful enough” with all the hill-climbing present along the course. She persevered and prevailed, accumulating five titles in the years since that first race. “It’s one of my favorite courses because it’s challenging,” McFadden said of the NYC Marathon’s layout. “You start on the Verrazano Bridge with a big climb [and] there’s a lot of steep downhills. When you go into Central Park, it’s a slight uphill, so the course is “different from all the other majors.”
(As golf and tennis have majors, there are majors in marathoning. There are six: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York City, and Tokyo.)
The impetus for putting McFadden and her fellow racers in this space’s spotlight is obviously perceptual in nature. To wit, most people don’t associate marathons with wheelchairs, let alone wheelchairs with technology. McFadden told me a good portion of her early career involved a lot of educating people on wheelchair racing and how adaptive athletes can compete like their able-bodied counterparts. The wave of enlightenment has paid off, as she called the NYC Marathon “one of the most inclusive and accessible sporting events in the world.” Running is very much a “community sport,” McFadden said, and the aforementioned NYRR and other organizers and sponsors have done a great job of listening to, and learning from, disabled racers. She added the push for greater inclusion has “really changed the mindset” of the general public on who exactly participates in these marathons and, more notably, wheelchair racing is a bonafide sport people take seriously.
For Scaroni, being an adaptive athlete isn’t dissimilar to being a regular one. The most important similarity, she told me, is “the inherent nature of sports” where people are training and competing to be the best. Adaptive sports, she told me, is one the rise in terms of awareness; many aspects of sports, like obtaining equipment, can be an expensive endeavor, and access is getting easier that way too. The salient point from is adaptive athletes have the same drive and tenacity to compete and win—the differences lie in how they get there. It’s accessibility.
Romanchuk explained wheelchair racing is “exactly what it sounds like.” Romanchuk, who began racing at 4 in Baltimore, told me a racing chair has three wheels: two large in the back and one small in the front. The racers use gloves to push the wheels along, with Romanchuk saying it all works through friction. He called wheelchair racing a “technique-based sport,” one requiring a good amount of muscle and upper-body strength.
“Technique is pretty critical,” Romanchuk said of wheelchair racing. “There’s a big group of us [at the University of Illinois] that will go out [and] train six days a week, one to two times a day. Every session might be an hour or an hour-and-a-half or so. We don’t lift weights too much, maybe twice a week; a lot of that is body weight or lighter weights because we don’t want to bulk up too much and then interfere with our range of motion or flexibility and stuff like that could potentially interfere with our our technique. It’s an amazing program here.”
McFadden, Scaroni, and Romanchuk all expressed similar sentiments on familial support, saying the backing of family and friends have proven integral to their individual successes in sport. McFadden was forthright in telling me “I don’t think I would have been as successful as I am” without her family’s support, adding “they never thought my dreams were too big.” She reiterated how the NYC Marathon organizers have been equally supportive of including the disability community and learn about wheelchair racing. For her part, Scaroni believes it’s important to continue advocating for adaptive sports largely because, beyond being athletes, it reinforces the reality disabled people are members of society. Romanchuk conceded he never thought he’d be a professional wheelchair racer, but he’s happy with his career and the ability to support himself and his new wife after getting married in August.
Looking towards the future, the trio of interviewees all said they expected to continue moving forward with the pursuit of wheelchair racing. McFadden said she’s looking forward to the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. Scaroni wants to continue racing but also go harder on the advocacy aspect, telling me she wants to help push “more exposure and awareness” of adaptive sports. Ultimately, she wants to help potential athletes believe in their abilities and chase their dreams.