Runners Adjust but Marathon Stays on Course Hurricane Sandy will have passed through New York by the start of the New York City Marathon on Sunday, but the storm is taking a toll on the weeklong schedule leading up to the race. Many of the roughly 47,000 runners, including many elite racers recruited by New York Road Runners, have had to juggle travel plans. One youth event has been moved indoors and other ceremonies have been delayed. Temporary structures that were built in advance will have to be rebuilt later in the week as Road Runners scrambles to prepare the course. "What we have focused on at this point is doing what we could in advance, and now we're looking at a greatly reduced schedule for the remainder of the week," Mary Wittenberg, chief executive of Road Runners, said in a conference call Monday. From an operations perspective, we remain extremely confident. Wittenberg cited the availability of 700 part-timers and 8,000 volunteers, and the organization's experience in adjusting on the fly, most notably in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001. That time Road Runners had weeks to prepare. This time it will be days. The Run With Champions, a youth program, will shift to the Armory and out of Central Park, and the painting of the finish line in the Park, which would have been Wednesday, has been delayed. For now, the runners' exposition at the Javitz Center on the West Side of Manhattan, where runners pick up their bibs, is to open as expected. The question is how many runners will get to New York, and when. Wittenberg said an elite runner from Italy rerouted his flight to Miami and, weather permitting, to Hartford. Kenyan runners who typically arrive on the Tuesday before the race face delays as well. Alberto Salazar, who was to appear at a media event Monday, had his flight from Oregon canceled. Brooks, a shoe company based in Washington State, canceled an event Tuesday in Manhattan featuring the runner Amy Hastings and hoped to reschedule for later this week. Members of the Brooks team traveled to New York a day early, but many other personnel were unable to leave Seattle. A Nike spokesman said his company did not anticipate any of its scheduled activities to be affected. Then there are the nearly 20,000 other runners from overseas, and the thousands of other runners who come from elsewhere in the United States. Before the storm, Wittenberg said, runners would have had until Oct. 31 to withdraw their entry. That deadline will be extended to Saturday, she said. While runners will be guaranteed a spot in next year's marathon, they will lose their entry fee from this year and have to pay a new entry fee next year. On Monday, many online running forums, including the New York Marathon's Facebook event page, were filled with runners comparing notes on how to get to New York rather than about their training schedules. Some runners traveling from Europe wrote that their flights were canceled and they were trying to find other ways to cross the Atlantic. Others joked that the event could turn into a duathlon, a combined running and swimming event. "Maybe the winds will push everyone to their fastest P.R.," another competitor mused. Kimatni Rawlins, 38, said he would "do whatever it takes" to get to New York from his home in Silver Spring, Md. For the former collegiate football player, the marathon - his first - is a capstone on a journey that began about a year ago. He became a vegan and began to run regularly. Since then, he has lost 40 pounds and planned to celebrate a new commitment to fitness by running in the marathon. "I'm hoping with all of my heart it works out," Rawlins said. Training for a marathon is a lot of work and time. It's a commitment and there's a lot of hype and supporters out there. Everyone here around D.C. is preparing for the storm and I've got all my gear, but you can't let the weather get you down. On the other side of the globe, in Wellington, New Zealand, Hayley Jones heard that her flight from Los Angeles to New York on Wednesday had been canceled. Jones, 41, said that she had never been to New York and that this would be her first marathon. A friend lent her an apartment in the city, and a bonus at work helped her pay for the plane ticket. "I've trained too hard for this," she said. New York is my dream city and I've wanted to go there for years and years. Jones said she planned to leave Wellington and arrive in Los Angeles on Wednesday as scheduled. From there, she hopes to forge a course to New York. "I'm going to run that race if it kills me," she said. And I want to drink coffee and eat bagels when I'm there.