Volunteer Q&A
Judith Som
Judith Som is a member of the Mercury Masters team for women age 50+, and a 14-time finisher of the ING New York City Marathon. We asked her about experiences volunteering with NYRR through the years.
How long have you been an NYRR volunteer?
I have been an NYRR member for 30 years. I volunteered for a lot of marathons before I got into the marathon—I also volunteered for the marathon when I couldn’t run due to injury. I’ve volunteered for seven or eight other NYRR races.
What made you decide to become a volunteer?
In the 1980s, NYRR sponsored volunteers for Hands Across America to feed the hungry and help the homeless. You should have seen it—there were people holding hands straight across New York. I was a marshal on the West Side Highway for the event, and I was paired up with this woman and we talked the entire day. A couple of months later, she volunteered at the Mini [a women-only 10K in Central Park]. We were so happy to see each other again. You meet a lot of people like that when volunteering—it’s part of being in the big NYRR family.
The Mercury Masters has a reputation for being great volunteers. What part do you play?
I’ve been with the Merms for four years now. We started an adopt-a-race program as a way to give back to NYRR and the community. The philosophy is if you want something to work, you need to pitch in and help. We all sit down and pick the two races we’re going to volunteer at each year; we typically don’t pick team points races because we want to run them. We did this before the obligatory 9+1 program.
What sort of feedback have you received about your volunteer work?
After volunteering and seeing the effect that it had on controlling the races, we all thought it was a good idea to continue the program. When you’re a runner, you know what people want to hear when they’re running a race. We are a very enthusiastic and vocal group, and we all have such a good time.
What advice would you give to runners who won’t volunteer, or to people who are shy about volunteering?
Stop viewing it as an obligation and see that you can have a lot of fun doing it. When people have fun, they will come back.
Why is the idea of establishing a community so important?
I remember when NYRR was much smaller, and the bigger something gets, typically the less personal it gets. But there is a sense of community—especially among those of us who’ve been running here a long time. You see the other runners at races and you recognize a certain person’s running style, and you basically suffer with the same people you have fun with.
If you could design the official NYRR volunteer shirt, what would it say? "If not you, who?”
