Mary Wittenberg, president of New York Road Runners and race director of the New York City Marathon, recently spoke to the Event Leadership Institute about how she came to be the first woman in charge of a major marathon, and how technology, sustainability, and partnering with numerous city agencies are critical to producing the race.
Here are some (condensed) highlights from the interview. You can watch a video of the full conversation here.
On sustainability: “Running is the ultimate green activity, right? So it’s really important to us as an organization and in our events to do all we can to be as green as possible. So what we do throughout our events is look to how we can recycle and then how we can then reduce the creation of waste. But what we do certainly at the start line now is, we try to gather as much of the tossed clothing as we can; some of it we donate, some of it we give to a company who’s involved in the recycling and selling of it. And that’s just a bit of the story. Ten years ago there was zero recycling and now, whether it’s the porta-johns, [which] are made of recycled materials, or whether we’re now taking the ferry across to Staten Island instead of a lot of buses. We still have buses, but we’re relying more and more on the ferries. Or whether it’s our recycling program for every cup on that course, where we’re now recycling some 60 tons of materials from race day, we’re really serious about it. It’s expensive and time-consuming, but we’re all about trying to reduce our carbon imprint as much as possible.”
On hiring: “We definitely need our pool of people that are visionary and creative, but we very much need, especially on the event team, you also need your best tax-analytical-engineer types. At the end of the day, you can dream all you want and be phenomenal and be creative and visual, but when you’re dealing with large-scale events, you have to have the basics quite sewn. So we do well with highly analytical, more engineer types who really want to get everything right and are really into precision and execution. It makes for a really good dynamic. You want people who are 'Yes, yes, yes, we can do it, here’s how we do it,' and then you want some people who will say, “Whoa, wait, here’s the way to do it, here’s what you got to think about with 40,000 people. Or here’s what you've got to think about, factoring in television, and here’s what you got to think about when you got to look at the challenges with live spectacles.' So we hire a variety of people.”
On her post-event ritual: “We take our athletes to a really nice dinner late Sunday night and some of the staff’s there, but what we’ve started doing is Wednesday night, we get our whole staff together, [in] blue jeans, and whether it’s a dive bar or a bowling alley, it’s just time for the team that made it happen to all get together and have some real fun.”
