Monday, May 19, 2025
Cristin Delaney-Guille laced up her running shoes on May 4, made her way to the starting line in Eisenhower Park and set off on her sixth or seventh Long Island Marathon. She’s run it so many times that she’s lost count.
Delaney-Guille, 44, of Long Beach, initially wasn’t going to enter the marathon, because she had run the Boston Marathon two weeks earlier, and hadn’t felt her best. She had some great pre-race runs in Boston, but from the very start on April 21, she felt off. It was a difficult run for her, but she still managed to set a personal best for the hilly course, with a time of 3 hours, 3 minutes, 39 seconds.
She was going to take time to relax and recover, but she just couldn’t let the Long Island marathon pass her by, especially after being the first female finisher last year, in 3:03:13.
“I didn’t think I was going to run Long Island, but then I get FOMO,” she joked, referring to the fear of missing out. “I know that this race was going on basically in my backyard. I was looking at the weather forecast, and I said, ‘Whatever, I’m going to do this one for fun.’ No pressure.”
At the starting line, she looked over and saw someone she knew from other marathons, 32-year-old Alyssa Salese, of Huntington, a few people away. When Delaney-Guille overheard Salese talking about the pace she was aiming for, 6:15 per mile, she thought to herself that she had even less pressure now, because she didn’t expect to be anywhere near that fast. Now she had an excuse to just have fun for 26.2 miles.
Salese eventually crossed the finish line first in the women’s field, in 3:03:57. Delaney-Guille finished second, just 16 seconds behind her.
“It wound up being a really fast first half for me, and I took a pretty good slide for the second half of the race,” Delaney-Guille, who works in the after-school program at Norman J. Levy Lakeside School in Merrick, said. “I really did burn myself out, but I was really having a good time. I had a lot of friends on the course that were there to support, and I wound up only missing the winning time by about 20 seconds. I couldn’t believe how close I got to such a talented athlete. So that was kind of exciting for me, too.”
Weather can play a major role in a runner’s comfort level. This year it was a little warmer than Delaney-Guille would have preferred, but it was overcast for most of the run, which helped neutralize the heat. She tends to struggle a bit more in the humidity, but she wasn’t affected too much this time around.
This month’s run was her 25th marathon. Along with her half-dozen or so Long Island Marathons, she has run Boston seven times, New York, Suffolk and smaller ones, including on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk. She is a member of the Long Run Crew, a team that she joined in 2008.
She started running about 19 years ago, when she moved to Long Beach from Floral Park. She gave birth to her daughter, Olivia, shortly afterward, and then started jogging to try to get back into pre-pregnancy shape. She had never run before, but her husband, Brian Guille, suggested that they run Long Beach’s 4-mile Snowflake Race together in February 2008. They did, and it wiped Cristin out — but that was only the beginning.
Later that year, she began training for her first marathon, in Philadelphia. She finished it, and entered a marathon each fall for a few years before adding one each spring as well. Now, 24 marathons later, she’s still going.
“It’s a fun race,” she said. “And at my age — I’m 44 right now — I just feel so lucky that I can compete in a marathon two weeks after I just ran one. It’s a blessing. I think I smiled that whole entire race, just happy to be able to do this thing that I love. This is the thing that I love. I’ll talk about running all day long.”
