Miling legend Bernard Lagat finishes 18th in debut at TCS New York City Marathon...

Five-time Olympian Bernard Lagat (left/photo by Mike Scott) ran his way to an 18th place finish in the TCS New York Marathon Sunday through the streets of New York.

The 43-year old former world champion at 1500 and 5000 meters, and two-time Olympic medalist at 1500 meters who retired from the track after the 2016 season, tackled the marathon for the first time in his career, finishing in a time of 2:17:20, five minutes off his goal of breaking the American masters record set by Meb Keflezghi.

After reaching the half-marathon mark in 1:06:06, he struggled through the second half, as his quads began cramping. By the time he reached Central Park for the last few miles, he struggled to maintain a decent pace, running the last four miles over 5:45 mile pace.

“My body felt hot and tired, but mostly it was my quads that were killing me,” he said. “At that point, time is irrelevant. You just want to finish, and you start to think about all you did to get here.”

At the post-race press conference, the Washington State alum said, “Man, it was something out there. It was fun, starting with all these guys. I've never been in such an environment like that before, about to run 26.2 miles. I had fun. I enjoyed it. The fans were amazing on the road. It's one of those things that I didn't even know going in that I would really experience something like that today. It was really awesome.”

When asked what the hardest part of the race was, he said, “So I would say the difficult part for me was really running on those incline roads and the bends and downhill. Those were a little bit that got me, especially I started feeling it on my quad, and then my calves started giving up towards the end.”

Afterwards, he was able to joke about losing his quads, and the effects of running 26 x one mile repeats without stopping and an extra 400 thrown in for good measure on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

I finished! The extra 0.2 after 26 x mile repeats. Thanks for all the support and encouragement. I lost my quads somewhere on the Queensboro. Might take me a few weeks to find it😜. No better place to run my debut than at the NYC marathon!

A post shared by Kip (@lagat1500) on Nov 4, 2018 at 2:56pm PST

Ethiopia’s Lelisa Desisa won the men’s race in a time of 2:05:59, followed by compatriot Shura Kitata in 2:06:01, with Kenya’s Geoffrey Kamworor third in 2:06:26.

Kenya’s Mary Keitany won the women’s race in 2:22:48, followed by fellow Kenyan Vivian Cheruiyot in 2:26:02, and defending champion Shalane Flanagan of the Portland based Bowerman Track Club in 2:26:22.

Results of the TCS New York City Marathon are available here.

NOTE:  The New York Road Runners contributed to this report.