Five thousand is perhaps how many people

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Which is why on a warm November morning I was standing on the upper deck of Verrazano Narrows Bridge with thousands of other people. That suspension bridge at the pinch point between upper and lower New York bays carries 13 lanes of car and truck traffic on two levels between Staten Island and Brooklyn when the race is not happening.

At 10:20 a.m., Frank Sinatra sang “New York, New York.” A cannon stopped everyone’s heart for a second. We shuffled northward.

I imagined I could feel the deck bouncing as we left behind Staten Island, the smallest New York borough by population (about a half million). All those people live in the same space as Alaska’s Douglas Island near Juneau (home to about 5,000 people).

were moving on the top tier of the Verrazano country wise email marketing list Narrows Bridge when my feet were on its asphalt Sunday. Not many of us looked alike. People chatted in some languages I could place, some not.

I turned and talked with Anna from Aruba, originally from Venezuela. Anna had braces on her teeth. Her teenage son spoke four languages.

“I am happy it is warm,” she said. “My training runs in Aruba are all at 27 degrees (Celsius, or 80 degrees Fahrenheit), so this feels good.”

“This is like the hottest day of Alaska’s summer,” I told Anna.

A temperature of 75F was recorded in Central Park on race day, a record for Nov. 6.

Heat is not a friend to most runners. When we overheat, mammals like us get tackled by lions — our cells don’t function well, our muscles cramp and we slow way down. I could feel my face getting red on the bridge, not yet into the second borough of the race and less than two miles into the day.

Approaching Brooklyn, we could hear it before we saw them: A soft, constant roar, like waves crashing the shore on the Lost Coast south of Yakutat.