About 1:15 on Sunday afternoon, several firefighters from Engine Company 35 in Harlem were parked at the corner of 124th Street and First Avenue during the New York City Marathon, when one noticed that a runner had collapsed, Lt. James Daley of Engine Company 35 said.
The firefighters weaved through the crowd of runners to the other side of the street, where they used a defibrillator to revive 51-year-old runner Michael Goulding of Fort Worth.
“It took about two or three minutes to get the heart beating,” Daley said in a telephone interview.
Daley said the firefighters were not assigned to monitor the marathon and were taking a break from their work.
“There weren’t any personnel from the marathon on that side of the street — it was just us,” he said.
Runners were stopped for a few seconds when the ambulance arrived to pick up Goulding, Daley said.
“By the time he was put into the ambulance, he was talking,” Daley recalled.
In a telephone interview, Goulding’s wife, Jan, said her husband had never run a marathon but had run a half-marathon. She said he did not have a heart condition and had recently lost several pounds.
“He called me from his cellphone at Mile 18 while he was running and said he was tired, but I bet they were all tired at that point,” Jan Goulding said. “The next thing I knew, he called me from the hospital.”
