Philadelphia welcomes displaced NYC marathoners

Editor's note: This is Jen Miller's first weekly Running column, which will appear every Sunday beginning next week.

The minute the New York City Marathon was canceled on Nov. 2, Melanie Johnson started getting the e-mails.

"Within 10 minutes, we had 60. Before the end of that evening, it was in the hundreds," said Johnson, who is the director of the Philadelphia Marathon.

The pleas were the same: Could you please let me run your race? The answer, eventually, was yes.

After the Nov. 4 New York City Marathon was canceled because of the damage from Sandy, 40,000 runners who had been training for a marathon had no race to run.

One regional alternative was Philadelphia's 26.2-mile race, scheduled for this Sunday. The only problem: All 14,500 spots had sold out by Oct. 1.

Mayor Nutter offered to move the entire New York City operation to Philadelphia on the original NYC Marathon date, though Johnson says it was more a symbolic gesture since arranging to hold a race for 40,000 people through Philadelphia could not be done in two days.

"It had us thinking what we could do, though," Johnson said.

After meeting with Philadelphia civic and police departments, and working with the New York Road Runners, which puts on the New York City Marathon, the Philadelphia organizers created a lottery for 3,000 additional spots for those displaced marathoners. Runners could sign up for the lottery by providing their NYC Marathon bib number. The fee - if a runner was chosen - was $200, half of which would go toward hurricane-relief efforts and half to cover costs of adding people to the race.

"We were able to work together and create another option for our runners, and we are extremely grateful to them for opening up the Philadelphia Marathon, which is a wonderful race," Mary Wittenberg, CEO of the New York Road Runners, said in a statement.

The 3,000-runner cap was unnecessary. Only 1,454 applied.

Anthony Marsala, 30, had signed up to run in New York City - his second marathon - because he grew up on Long Island and this race was on his bucket list. His home in Point Pleasant, N.J., at the Jersey Shore had been largely spared damage from Sandy, but some of his relatives' homes had not. He spent most of the post-Sandy week ripping out carpets and digging sand out of basements, thinking he'd run the race if there was one. When it was canceled, he figured he'd run it in 2013.

"I was just thinking about it more and more and said 'Hey, I put in six months of training. What if something comes up next year and I'm unable to do it?' " he said.

Philadelphia was an answer.

Sabrina Martin, 24, moved to New York City in June of last year and chose to run for one of the race sponsors' teams because she enjoyed running through her new hometown.

"When they canceled the event, I understood and thought it was a wise decision," she said, but she trained and still wanted to run, so she entered the Philadelphia lottery.

"I'm really excited and, frankly, relieved," she said.