Tiphaine Tarhan and David Kanter’s wedding this past August coincided with their “long run” day, in preparation for the 2015 New York City Marathon. Tarhan and Kanter ran the sixteen miles two days before their wedding along the coast of Saint-Tropez in France. Sunday, they ran the marathon side by side.
Four years earlier, mutual friends introduced Tarhan and Kanter during a meetup at the Brooklyn Bowl. Kanter was living in New Jersey and finishing his Ph.D. studies at Princeton University, while Tarhan was working as a senior account director in New York City. A few months after they met, they started dating.
On weekends, Kanter’s visits to New York to spend time with Tarhan brought an unexpected change to his life: Kanter never ran before meeting Tarhan, but she was a devoted runner who started her day with a workout.
“If you run in the morning, you take it off the list and you are so content with yourself,” Tarhan said. “You feel like you’ve achieved something. The whole day you are pumped up.”
Kanter, however, says he’s more of a night person. And while he agrees that morning running leaves him feeling better throughout the day, he still wants his sleep.
Nevertheless, the couple’s love grew and so did Kanter’s commitment to running. At first, Kanter couldn’t run longer than twenty minutes at a time because he hadn’t yet upgraded from his uncomfortable, old sneakers from high school. But on Tarphan’s birthday, he surprised her with three gifts, and one of them was a pair of running shoes for himself.
Tarphan said the sneakers weren’t the only gift Kanter bought himself for her birthday. “For another birthday he bought me a running stick that I never use,” she said. “He uses it everyday.”
Tarhan and Kanter ran the 2015 NYC Marathon much like previous races — side by side. In addition to motivating each other and working together to follow a routine, their actual runs together have helped their relationship.
“You run for three hours, so you talk and even sometimes get annoyed with one another,” Kanter said. “But then, time passes, you overcome and move past the problem.”
After the race Sunday, as the newlyweds waited for their friends to arrive at a bar in Union Square to celebrate their very first marathon run, Kanter said he felt victorious.
“You realize that your body can do more than you let it, and how powerful mental strength is,” he said. “When your body is giving up on you, your brain is able to say: ‘No! You are going to do this.’”
