New York Times, Thursday, November 2, 2017

A couple years ago on the JoCo Cruise, I helped Peter Sagal out with the clues for a game show—I know, right?—and so it seemed about time for him to return the favor. Peter was a more-than-willing collaborator, and we fleshed out a lot of ideas that didn't really go anywhere. Eventually I posed to Peter, who runs a lot of marathons, the obvious question "What about a marathon puzzle?" Peter wanted to run the New York Marathon this week, and so he came up with this insane and stellar idea of drawing a map of the entire marathon route. To which I said, "Uh, yeah, I *think* I can do that," and came up with this.

Actually, the first grid *also* had a 26-letter message—RUN AND RUN TILL THE RACE IS DONE—running from the second R in FERRY to the N and E at the start of NEW YORK MARATHON, with the black squares being the bridges between the boroughs. Which was great except Will went, "Okay, but why?" And he was—stop me if this sounds familiar—completely correct. I ripped that out and made a much better grid with Will and Peter's guidance.

Once that was done, Peter clued the first pass all by himself, and OMG he's like the best crossword cluer ever. That brain is crammed with so much trivia, he's probably had to delete the node that tells him how to use a fork. I had no freaking idea about half the stuff he crammed into there. For me though, the best clues of his are the ones that just roll off as effortless comments, like the ones for MOO, IMHO, and ROCK ON. It was a great three-way collaboration with me, Peter, and Will. I hope we get to do it again soon. Now Peter just has to teach me how to be a radio god and we're even.

Anyway, RIGHT NOW, go to Peter's crowdfunding page for his run on Sunday, because he's doing this awesome thing where his team guides a visually impaired runner.

Meanwhile, I'll also be doing a marathon of a different kind, playing Dungeons & Dragons all day to benefit children hospitals for Extra Life. Mine's just like his, but with less sweating and more orcs.

Fun use of the NEW YORK MARATHON's course in this puzzle. It starts in Staten Island (Step 1), goes through Brooklyn (Step 2), etc., and each step along the way helps the puzzle to completion. The FERRY isn't the passenger ship since 1817 — it's the (Staten Island) FERRY. The old baseball team is not just the DODGERS, but the (Brooklyn) DODGERS.

My favorites were the ones where the clue/answer made zero sense until you got the gimmick. How could a show of contempt be a CHEER? Ah, when it's a Bronx CHEER!

Some didn't work as well — I didn't even realize that Queens was part of (Queens) ENGLISH, as this low-brow Yank thinks of any ENGLISH accent as upper-class.

We've added the implied BOROUGHs below in case you're still confused.

So fortuitous that the themers worked out to be symmetrical. There's not a lot of options for "Manhattan ___" or "Bronx ___," so Peter and Mike must have held their breath, hoping that the crossword gods would shine down on them. The puzzle might have worked okay with asymmetrical lengths, but it's so much more elegant to obey the rules of crossword symmetry.

Solid construction. Although the themers are mostly short, seven of them is wicked hard, especially when you're working with a central 15-letter entry. At first, I wondered why they left the NW and SE so wide open — a bit of ISLA / ISUP / AGA glue is almost always necessary to hold a big section like this together. Why not break them up a bit?

Ah. Mike and Peter had to deploy so many of their black squares in the middle of the grid that they ran out in the NW / SE. 15x15 crosswords can't go above 78 words, so if you break up a whole lot of entries into short words in the middle, you necessarily end up with some long ones around the perimeter.

Fun concept, made me want to get back out and train!