Some years, the day dawns clear and crisp, others, it stays gray and wet. Regardless of the weather, on the first Sunday in November, more than 25,000 people from all over the planet traditionally line up at one end of the Verrazano Bridge for the New York City marathon, the largest in the world. The course of the race is designed to take the runners through all five boroughs of New York. They start in Staten Island, the most isolated and least populated part of the city, with just 379,000 inhabitants. Mostly suburbs and villages, Staten Island is home to New York City's last remaining farms. Across the Verrazano Bridge, the marathoners enter Brooklyn, New York's most populous borough: home to Coney Island, world-famous pizza, and 2.3 million people who wish the Dodgers had never left for Los Angeles. From Brooklyn, the runners head to Queens across New York's only non-water boundary between boroughs. The city's largest borough by area, Queens is also home to the city's two international airports -- LaGuardia and JFK. After a jaunt across the 59th Street Bridge, the runners take a brief run through Manhattan on their way to the Bronx. The only one of New York's boroughs situated on the North American mainland, the Bronx is home to 1.2 million people. Then, it's over the Harlem River into Manhattan, the core of the "Big Apple," and -- for the marathon survivors -- the finish line in Central Park. As the city's Mayor Giuliani has remarked, the marathon represents the spirit of New York, where people racing for common dreams and goals draw the five boroughs together.
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