Possibly no one is more excited for this year’s New York City Marathon than Dahlia Lopez Ramsay.
The Manhattan native isn't competing on Sunday, but for the third year in a row, she’ll be there cheering on “adopted” strangers — runners she met at the pre-race Expo (where runners pick up their race materials) who don’t have friends or family to root for them along the 26.2-mile course.
Typically, she brings a sign to the Expo announcing her desire to cheer for people, who take her up on her offer.
After confirming they don’t have anyone cheering for them on Race Day, she takes their picture and gets their bib number so that she can track their progress on the Marathon app and celebrate them when they pass by.
Lopez Ramsay at the Expo offering to track and cheer for visiting runners.
So far she’s adopted about 20 runners in the past three years. Her enthusiasm is independent of the marathon’s official sponsors and organizers; she does this on her own.
“I anticipate this day all year. Like the Olympic torch passing through towns, like Santa Claus dropping by with presents, like the New Year’s countdown,” said Lopez Ramsay.
The teaching artist and tour guide started “volun-cheering,” as she calls the tradition, as a child growing up on the Upper West Side: Her late father, Don Ramsay, would take her to Central Park, where they’d hold out water for the runners in the last stretch of the 26.2 mile course.
“I’m doing this in memory of him,” she said. “This is very much my dad living through me and every value that I put into cheering for other people is because that’s how he lived his life.”
Dahlia, age 4, in Central Park getting ready to “volun-cheer” at the NYC marathon in 1990.
As a result of continually cherishing Marathon Day as an opportunity to honor her dad and perform random acts of kindness, it has become her favorite day of the year and what she refers to as one of her “personal High Holy Days.”
These are holidays which, by Lopez Ramsay’s definition, are “outdoor, highly participatory gatherings where we honor human creativity, mortality, ingenuity and perseverance,” she said. Halloween and the Day of the Dead are also on this list. “These are the days we bring out the best in each other and ourselves.”
Team Tissue in Sunset Park, 2023.
The ways she encourages competitors have evolved over the years: Currently, she and her friends who join her on the sidelines pass out tissues, learn their adoptees’ names so they can yell more personal cheers, and carry uplifting signs.
Why would a runner need a tissue?
“Of course runners need tissues,” Lopez Ramsay explained. “They've been standing around in the cold in Staten Island for hours and now their bodies are moving. Fluids are just immediately going to run out of your face and that must be so uncomfortable.”
All are welcome to join Team Tissue. This year they’ll be starting the day encouraging runners near Lopez Ramsay’s home in Sunset Park before heading north to the Bronx.
“We’ve never cheered in the Bronx before, but we’ve heard it’s a low cheer zone, not as loud as it should be,” she said.
Rotellini after finishing the marathon in 2022.
It’ll be such a long day of applauding strangers, Lopez Ramsay plans to take Monday off work to recover, but she has no doubt the emotional payoff will be worth it.
“You're just, like, going and doing a thing that is needed and getting constant, constant hours of reinforcement and affirmation that you are appreciated by every single runner that comes by and is just delighted by your presence,” she said. “That never stops feeling good”
Perhaps the only ones more delighted by Marathon Day than Lopez Ramsay are those she chooses to adopt.
The generosity from strangers “just blew my mind,” said John Rotellini, a Las Vegas-based magician who flew in for the 2022 Marathon and met Lopez Ramsay at that year’s Expo.
“It was so awesome and made the race so lovely to have people ‘Where's Waldo-ing’ their way through the race to make sure that you could see them, hear them cheering you on. That was such a special gift, and Dahlia and her collective crew made that happen,” he said, in a phone interview from Nevada.
As for whether she’d ever consider actually running the Marathon, that’ll be a hard pass.
“I have no desire to actually run it, because then I couldn’t cheer,” she said.
