Nov. 1, 2026
Wake Up at 3AM, Freak Out at 4AM; It’s Marathon Morning in NYC
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RSS Feed It’s THE best day of the year in NY: the TCS New York City Marathon. T. J. will be among the 60,000 runners. It’s his fourth NYC marathon, but his first that he’ll run without … Amy Robach. That fact plus a nagging injury makes this marathon morning feel … different.
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00:00:10
Speaker 1: Hey there, folks. It is Sunday, November 1st, and today is absolutely the most thrilling, exciting, it is the best day in New York. It is New York Marathon Sunday, and as exciting of a day as it is, I just ain't there yet. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and T.J., To be honest with you, I've never really done this before. As I'm recording this, it is about four in the morning. My dear bride is still asleep, and I am getting ready for the New York City Marathon. This is the first year, excuse me, this is the first time I run a marathon, attempted to run a marathon, and not had my dear Amy Robach by my side. And if any of you have been following what I've been doing for the past several weeks, months, and even the past couple of years, I've been nursing a pretty bad injury on my foot. that I have no idea how it's going to hold up, and that is keeping me from being excited this morning, and I'm trying to snap out of it, I just don't, even if you're in perfect health, getting ready for a marathon, I mean, absolutely nothing physically feels wrong with you, you still, something's going to go wrong, it's still going to be painful, but to go into it with an injury already that I haven't fully tested, I guess, for a 15, 20 miler in my training is making me a little nervous, so I As I sit here with you all, I mean, it's scary to sound too descriptive, but yeah, I'm sitting here in underwear and putting on socks. I'm putting on special compression socks. The way this goes, and thank you to New York Roadrunners, give you a little insight into the morning. Really, for the past week, I'll start there, you had to start eating a certain way, so I've cut out. Right, you do your diet right. All week, you got to pay attention to that. And then for the last couple of days, I've eaten something that I haven't been eating. I don't normally eat because I'm keto. I've been having pasta for the past several days, just a carb load to load up. So I feel at least in that regard, I'm in a good spice. I'm in a good space. Spice, what is that? In a good space. And I fueled properly, but my foot, I am looking at a bottle of Voltron, people use that for arthritis. That's an arthritis medicine. I got Tylenol Precise Nighttime, Tylenol Precise Cooling. I got BioFreeze. There's a bottle of Advil over there. There is two packages of Twizzlers, a five-hour energy extra strength, two sets of AirPods, and an ankle brace. I have a brand-new pair of shoes that I'm using today, my Nike AlphaFlies, and I have some recovery slippers. That's the day. This is my fourth New York City Marathon, and it is different, yes, because of the injury, but I am doing this in a year that, yes, I need as much help and guidance and assistance maybe along the way as possible, but this is my first marathon. I have run alone. I will not have a friend, a partner, anybody next to me. I have run with my dear Amy Robach for every single marathon that I have done over the years, and she has been right there with me, so That adds to it a little bit as well, the anxiety. Look, this is fun. It is exciting. And I know a lot of people look at runners and think we're all crazy, but this is just, it's thrilling. It's what we do. I can imagine, I said, as long as I'm healthy, I will run the New York City Marathon the rest of my life that I'm here in New York. But it is painful. It is at times dangerous. What is it? What year was it? The Brooklyn Half Marathon. guy died at the end of that marathon, fell out at the end, right at the finish line, so I don't even know why I put that out there, but that it might have, the point being, this is a little scary, it is a little dangerous, it is a little risky, but we do it, and we love it, and I put some pressure on myself, I suppose, by speaking about it publicly, I worry, I'm trying to manage that a today during the race to not think to myself, oh man, I'm in really bad pain, but I've been doing interviews and people have been talking about it and people are rooting for me, so I don't want to let anybody down or embarrass myself. That's in the back of my head as well. I am going into this a little messed up, I suppose, but I'm trying to get my head right. So I set two alarms this morning. Daylight savings certainly helps. You get an extra hour, so I probably got more sleep than I'm used to getting last night, so that's a good thing, but I still got up. The alarm was set for 3, but I got up a little before 2 this morning. I actually got out of bed and went to the couch and put on snaps on Peacock and watched a couple episodes of Women Murderers. Yeah, this is how my morning started. But dozed a little bit. So sleep-wise, I feel okay. The foot itself this morning feels a little... Actually, it's not quite wonky. Yeah, let me be, as much as I'm complaining, excuse me, being anxious about the day, the morning is actually starting the best I could possibly hope for. I'm not in pain. I am not concerned. I don't feel, right, as far as physically, this is the best I could ever hope for. It doesn't matter what happens later. You at least want to start on a good note. This is the best note I could possibly start at. So that is a good thing. There's a package of bagels sitting in there. Robach is going to be stationed throughout the race with Twizzlers and Tylenol and maybe Lidocaine for me. Folks are listening going, why in the God's name are you doing this? What's the point if you got to go through all this to get to the finish line? Yeah, you make a good point. I don't know. It gets in you and you become a runner and they tell you after your first marathon, you're either going to go, it ain't no way in hell I'm doing this again, or I can't wait to do the next one. And I was in that latter group, and I have done it year after year after year, and I'm doing it this year. I will say my doctor, I have been getting injections in my foot. Some of you have been following me on social media. The injections in the foot, cortisol injections, I believe, every two weeks that have been helpful. I will say, as crazy as it sounds, with the foot injury I had, my doctor has given me the okay injection. to run. If he told me, oh, no, you're risking this or that, obviously I wouldn't do it. But he's giving the okay. He is rooting for me. He is hoping. He said, I need to get you across the finish line. He refused to give me any other new type of treatment so close to the race that, yeah, it might have a bad reaction to that. At this point, it is what it is. It is what it is. So I usually wake up on marathon morning worried about my stomach. When you're running and jostling out there for four hours and your stomach is going up and down, you don't want a lot of stuff in it. And so it's a thing with runners all the time. You're freaked out about what to put in your stomach to make sure, quite frankly, you don't get to mile 15 and got to poop. It's just how it is. You see those signs people make on the sign at the spectators. I'll see it this year as well. It says, don't trust that fart. Runners get that. And there have been, oh my God, what was the woman recently did? She had to apologize because she was doing a, an endurance race, and she just started pooping on herself, and she didn't give a damn and kept going. And she won, actually, and then she got disqualified for it. Anyway, obviously that's not going to happen. Point is, it's a really big deal to make sure you get your stomach right in the morning. I feel pretty good, as crazy as it sounds. This might be some of the best physically that I have felt in any marathon on marathon morning. I feel confident, at least in how I feel. The uncertainty just is in that foot. All right, I continue here on Amy and TJ. I'm recording this. I'm going to have to leave in a short while, heading to the New York City Marathon pickup spot. The way this goes in New York City, the New York Roadrunners, the organization that puts this on, every year have just been wonderful to me for months. They reached out and I told them, hey guys, I got this foot injury. I don't know if I'll do it. So I don't want to commit and have you all go fully in promoting and telling folks that TJ is going to be there and I can't do it. And they said, nope, we will follow your journey. You do what you can. And so they've been great for me, uh, to me throughout this process, the way they have this set up for us is that I have to meet up on 51st street. Um, other folks, uh, celeb runners, if you will. Um, we get on one bus, they drive us over the Verrazano bridge and we wait for the next couple of hours, uh, until it's time to run. It's always, we see some of the same people year after year, some influencers, a couple of actors, Claire, I don't know if she'll be there this year, Chelsea Clinton, I don't know if she'll be there this year, I think she just did the Chicago Marathon, but it is fun. I'll see my man Matt, Matt James is running again this year, so it's always, that part is always fun, and you form a little camaraderie and a little group with those folks you see after years. So we'll hop on a bus. They'll drop us over. We'll hang. We'll wait. We'll get in line. I am running at 9 a.m., 9.10, I believe is my official start time. So you do the math. It should take me about four hours, if all goes fairly well, to cross that finish line. The foot, some might remember, but I ended up in the back of an ambulance two years ago at the Chicago Marathon because of a foot injury. That foot injury is the same thing I'm still dealing with. It started out as an Achilles situation. It moved to a ligament situation, and I now have a tendon situation. Had an MRI about three, four months ago, and the result of that initially looked terrible. Severe scar tissue, a tendon possibly had fallen off the bone. They said I possibly had a stress fracture, and I had my Achilles strain in the back. So didn't run for six weeks, started running again slowly, and Haven't gotten it all out of there. Scar tissue and some tendon inflammation is what I'm trying to manage. Yes, what this might boil down to, folks, how much pain can I endure? Doc says I'm not at risk. He's not putting me out there at risk of doing further damage. But when this thing flares up, imagine... You know that tool in your knife set in the kitchen? the sharpener, right? It's that long cylindrical tool you can pull out and it has a really dull edge. It's a big metal rod with a dull edge. So imagine taking that dull point at the end and putting it on the side of my foot and then just pressing as hard as you can. That's the pain. It's a sharp, it's in one spot, And when it comes, man, you are in trouble. So I got lidocaine. I got numbing cream. I got, what is this, the Voltron? It's supposed to be an arthritis medicine, for God's sake. I got Advil. And that's going to have to be it. It might just be a mind game. So I thank my dear love, my dear Amy Robach, who is having a little FOMO that she's not running it this year. She just wanted to take a year off, but this is the first time she's been a spectator. So she has already set. It's pretty cute. She's actually, she and her friend Nikki, whose boyfriend is running in it as well, have actually, they ordered signs from Amazon. They're literally, they're making signs, you all. That should be fun. So she's going to be at mile 8, mile 12, mile 17. So they are strategic about where they're going to be placed, and she'll have Advil, lidocaine, twizzlers, and kisses. Um, at various points, I don't know which one of those things I might need more throughout the race. Um, but just wanted to hop on this the first time. I don't know if this is some kind of confessional. I don't know what to call this, but it's, uh, yeah, I'm trying to get my head right, uh, this morning. So, uh, plenty of you have supported and sent notes and thumbs up and followed along. And many of you runners as well know what this is about. Um, So we'll see what happens. I don't think I'll be posting too much during the race like I normally do, just trying to stay focused. Thank you to my friends and family, my loved ones. Everybody sent me one song, so I made a playlist. So a lot of friends and family, my loved ones, will be along for the run. You all, appreciate you as always, and thank you for taking a minute here with me. My dear Roebuck is still sleeping, so I wanted to let her sleep. She has a long day as well of supporting her hubby. So appreciate you all spending some time and supporting, as always, me and us. But for now, I am TJ. On behalf of my dear Amy Roebuck, the next time I talk to you, hopefully there will be a medal around my neck.
Speaker 1: Hey there, folks. It is Sunday, November 1st, and today is absolutely the most thrilling, exciting, it is the best day in New York. It is New York Marathon Sunday, and as exciting of a day as it is, I just ain't there yet. And with that, welcome to this episode of Amy and T.J., To be honest with you, I've never really done this before. As I'm recording this, it is about four in the morning. My dear bride is still asleep, and I am getting ready for the New York City Marathon. This is the first year, excuse me, this is the first time I run a marathon, attempted to run a marathon, and not had my dear Amy Robach by my side. And if any of you have been following what I've been doing for the past several weeks, months, and even the past couple of years, I've been nursing a pretty bad injury on my foot. that I have no idea how it's going to hold up, and that is keeping me from being excited this morning, and I'm trying to snap out of it, I just don't, even if you're in perfect health, getting ready for a marathon, I mean, absolutely nothing physically feels wrong with you, you still, something's going to go wrong, it's still going to be painful, but to go into it with an injury already that I haven't fully tested, I guess, for a 15, 20 miler in my training is making me a little nervous, so I As I sit here with you all, I mean, it's scary to sound too descriptive, but yeah, I'm sitting here in underwear and putting on socks. I'm putting on special compression socks. The way this goes, and thank you to New York Roadrunners, give you a little insight into the morning. Really, for the past week, I'll start there, you had to start eating a certain way, so I've cut out. Right, you do your diet right. All week, you got to pay attention to that. And then for the last couple of days, I've eaten something that I haven't been eating. I don't normally eat because I'm keto. I've been having pasta for the past several days, just a carb load to load up. So I feel at least in that regard, I'm in a good spice. I'm in a good space. Spice, what is that? In a good space. And I fueled properly, but my foot, I am looking at a bottle of Voltron, people use that for arthritis. That's an arthritis medicine. I got Tylenol Precise Nighttime, Tylenol Precise Cooling. I got BioFreeze. There's a bottle of Advil over there. There is two packages of Twizzlers, a five-hour energy extra strength, two sets of AirPods, and an ankle brace. I have a brand-new pair of shoes that I'm using today, my Nike AlphaFlies, and I have some recovery slippers. That's the day. This is my fourth New York City Marathon, and it is different, yes, because of the injury, but I am doing this in a year that, yes, I need as much help and guidance and assistance maybe along the way as possible, but this is my first marathon. I have run alone. I will not have a friend, a partner, anybody next to me. I have run with my dear Amy Robach for every single marathon that I have done over the years, and she has been right there with me, so That adds to it a little bit as well, the anxiety. Look, this is fun. It is exciting. And I know a lot of people look at runners and think we're all crazy, but this is just, it's thrilling. It's what we do. I can imagine, I said, as long as I'm healthy, I will run the New York City Marathon the rest of my life that I'm here in New York. But it is painful. It is at times dangerous. What is it? What year was it? The Brooklyn Half Marathon. guy died at the end of that marathon, fell out at the end, right at the finish line, so I don't even know why I put that out there, but that it might have, the point being, this is a little scary, it is a little dangerous, it is a little risky, but we do it, and we love it, and I put some pressure on myself, I suppose, by speaking about it publicly, I worry, I'm trying to manage that a today during the race to not think to myself, oh man, I'm in really bad pain, but I've been doing interviews and people have been talking about it and people are rooting for me, so I don't want to let anybody down or embarrass myself. That's in the back of my head as well. I am going into this a little messed up, I suppose, but I'm trying to get my head right. So I set two alarms this morning. Daylight savings certainly helps. You get an extra hour, so I probably got more sleep than I'm used to getting last night, so that's a good thing, but I still got up. The alarm was set for 3, but I got up a little before 2 this morning. I actually got out of bed and went to the couch and put on snaps on Peacock and watched a couple episodes of Women Murderers. Yeah, this is how my morning started. But dozed a little bit. So sleep-wise, I feel okay. The foot itself this morning feels a little... Actually, it's not quite wonky. Yeah, let me be, as much as I'm complaining, excuse me, being anxious about the day, the morning is actually starting the best I could possibly hope for. I'm not in pain. I am not concerned. I don't feel, right, as far as physically, this is the best I could ever hope for. It doesn't matter what happens later. You at least want to start on a good note. This is the best note I could possibly start at. So that is a good thing. There's a package of bagels sitting in there. Robach is going to be stationed throughout the race with Twizzlers and Tylenol and maybe Lidocaine for me. Folks are listening going, why in the God's name are you doing this? What's the point if you got to go through all this to get to the finish line? Yeah, you make a good point. I don't know. It gets in you and you become a runner and they tell you after your first marathon, you're either going to go, it ain't no way in hell I'm doing this again, or I can't wait to do the next one. And I was in that latter group, and I have done it year after year after year, and I'm doing it this year. I will say my doctor, I have been getting injections in my foot. Some of you have been following me on social media. The injections in the foot, cortisol injections, I believe, every two weeks that have been helpful. I will say, as crazy as it sounds, with the foot injury I had, my doctor has given me the okay injection. to run. If he told me, oh, no, you're risking this or that, obviously I wouldn't do it. But he's giving the okay. He is rooting for me. He is hoping. He said, I need to get you across the finish line. He refused to give me any other new type of treatment so close to the race that, yeah, it might have a bad reaction to that. At this point, it is what it is. It is what it is. So I usually wake up on marathon morning worried about my stomach. When you're running and jostling out there for four hours and your stomach is going up and down, you don't want a lot of stuff in it. And so it's a thing with runners all the time. You're freaked out about what to put in your stomach to make sure, quite frankly, you don't get to mile 15 and got to poop. It's just how it is. You see those signs people make on the sign at the spectators. I'll see it this year as well. It says, don't trust that fart. Runners get that. And there have been, oh my God, what was the woman recently did? She had to apologize because she was doing a, an endurance race, and she just started pooping on herself, and she didn't give a damn and kept going. And she won, actually, and then she got disqualified for it. Anyway, obviously that's not going to happen. Point is, it's a really big deal to make sure you get your stomach right in the morning. I feel pretty good, as crazy as it sounds. This might be some of the best physically that I have felt in any marathon on marathon morning. I feel confident, at least in how I feel. The uncertainty just is in that foot. All right, I continue here on Amy and TJ. I'm recording this. I'm going to have to leave in a short while, heading to the New York City Marathon pickup spot. The way this goes in New York City, the New York Roadrunners, the organization that puts this on, every year have just been wonderful to me for months. They reached out and I told them, hey guys, I got this foot injury. I don't know if I'll do it. So I don't want to commit and have you all go fully in promoting and telling folks that TJ is going to be there and I can't do it. And they said, nope, we will follow your journey. You do what you can. And so they've been great for me, uh, to me throughout this process, the way they have this set up for us is that I have to meet up on 51st street. Um, other folks, uh, celeb runners, if you will. Um, we get on one bus, they drive us over the Verrazano bridge and we wait for the next couple of hours, uh, until it's time to run. It's always, we see some of the same people year after year, some influencers, a couple of actors, Claire, I don't know if she'll be there this year, Chelsea Clinton, I don't know if she'll be there this year, I think she just did the Chicago Marathon, but it is fun. I'll see my man Matt, Matt James is running again this year, so it's always, that part is always fun, and you form a little camaraderie and a little group with those folks you see after years. So we'll hop on a bus. They'll drop us over. We'll hang. We'll wait. We'll get in line. I am running at 9 a.m., 9.10, I believe is my official start time. So you do the math. It should take me about four hours, if all goes fairly well, to cross that finish line. The foot, some might remember, but I ended up in the back of an ambulance two years ago at the Chicago Marathon because of a foot injury. That foot injury is the same thing I'm still dealing with. It started out as an Achilles situation. It moved to a ligament situation, and I now have a tendon situation. Had an MRI about three, four months ago, and the result of that initially looked terrible. Severe scar tissue, a tendon possibly had fallen off the bone. They said I possibly had a stress fracture, and I had my Achilles strain in the back. So didn't run for six weeks, started running again slowly, and Haven't gotten it all out of there. Scar tissue and some tendon inflammation is what I'm trying to manage. Yes, what this might boil down to, folks, how much pain can I endure? Doc says I'm not at risk. He's not putting me out there at risk of doing further damage. But when this thing flares up, imagine... You know that tool in your knife set in the kitchen? the sharpener, right? It's that long cylindrical tool you can pull out and it has a really dull edge. It's a big metal rod with a dull edge. So imagine taking that dull point at the end and putting it on the side of my foot and then just pressing as hard as you can. That's the pain. It's a sharp, it's in one spot, And when it comes, man, you are in trouble. So I got lidocaine. I got numbing cream. I got, what is this, the Voltron? It's supposed to be an arthritis medicine, for God's sake. I got Advil. And that's going to have to be it. It might just be a mind game. So I thank my dear love, my dear Amy Robach, who is having a little FOMO that she's not running it this year. She just wanted to take a year off, but this is the first time she's been a spectator. So she has already set. It's pretty cute. She's actually, she and her friend Nikki, whose boyfriend is running in it as well, have actually, they ordered signs from Amazon. They're literally, they're making signs, you all. That should be fun. So she's going to be at mile 8, mile 12, mile 17. So they are strategic about where they're going to be placed, and she'll have Advil, lidocaine, twizzlers, and kisses. Um, at various points, I don't know which one of those things I might need more throughout the race. Um, but just wanted to hop on this the first time. I don't know if this is some kind of confessional. I don't know what to call this, but it's, uh, yeah, I'm trying to get my head right, uh, this morning. So, uh, plenty of you have supported and sent notes and thumbs up and followed along. And many of you runners as well know what this is about. Um, So we'll see what happens. I don't think I'll be posting too much during the race like I normally do, just trying to stay focused. Thank you to my friends and family, my loved ones. Everybody sent me one song, so I made a playlist. So a lot of friends and family, my loved ones, will be along for the run. You all, appreciate you as always, and thank you for taking a minute here with me. My dear Roebuck is still sleeping, so I wanted to let her sleep. She has a long day as well of supporting her hubby. So appreciate you all spending some time and supporting, as always, me and us. But for now, I am TJ. On behalf of my dear Amy Roebuck, the next time I talk to you, hopefully there will be a medal around my neck.