Rescuers will first perform a test run, sending the empty capsule down and up the bore hole. A rescuer will then enter the capsule, traversing the hole multiple times “taking some measures.” After which, at the bottom, he will aid the first miner into the capsule, which will then be sent to the surface. A second rescuer will travel down the hole, where a second miner will ascend. From there, the two rescuers will continually send the remaining miners to the surface.

Traveling at 1 meter per second, the trip from the bottom to the top is estimated to be between 10 to 15 minutes. The descent is expected to take 25 to 30 minutes.

After 12 hours, two additional rescuers will be sent down to provide help and rest for the first rescuers.

“He came out, and they started cheering for him, and he was cheering with them,” she said. “He was clearly a bit overwhelmed by it all.”

Marathon officials invited Pena to attend after hearing about how he jogged in the mines while trapped underground. They were surprised to learn Monday that the triathlete wanted to run the race.

Pena was one of the 33 miners whose saga captivated the world when they were trapped for 69 days after an Aug. 5 collapse stranded them nearly a half-mile underground. The 34-year-old Pena, the 12th miner rescued, is also a big Elvis Presley fan who received an invitation to visit Graceland.

Gebrselassie, the Ethiopian star, is running his first NYC Marathon. He was joined at the airport by 2004 New York champion Hendrick Ramaala of South Africa.

“He also said we can’t say things to the media without their permission,” said Ximena Alejandra Reygadas, 37. “He said they need to decide what we can tell the media.”

Hundreds of reporters abandoned the mine and descended on this gritty provincial capital on Thursday after the world watched in awe the men’s’ nearly flawless rescue through a narrow hole it took a month to drill.

A shift foreman at the San Jose mine who is close to many of the men told The Associated Press they have hired an accountant to track their income from public appearances and equitably distribute it.

“More than anything, I think the idea is to charge for the rights to everything that’s been shown about their personal life, of their odyssey. That way, they’re safe,” said Pablo Ramirez.

Ramirez, 29, had lowered himself deep into the mine’s bowels right after its Aug. 5 collapse in a vain attempt to reach his comrades.

“They’re going to be very close to the chest and will speak together as a group,” he said, while drinking rum and coke in a Copiapo restaurant.

Ramirez is out of a job with the roughly 360 other San Jose miners now that the government has decided to close it as unsafe. And while he said he’s got good job prospects as an experienced miner, his buddies were probably the most in-demand people on the planet.

A Greek mining company wants to bring them to the sunny Aegean islands. Soccer teams in Madrid, Manchester and Buenos Aires want them in their stadiums.

Bolivia’s president wants them at his palace. TV host Don Francisco wants them all on his popular “Sabado Gigante” show in Miami.

On Thursday, still wearing the fashion sunglasses designed to ease their readjustment to sunlight, the men posed in hospital bathrobes for a group photo with President Sebastian Pinera.

Solidarity helped the men survive the angst and uncertainty of being trapped under a 700,000-ton block that collapsed at the very center of the mine — the area Ramirez said everyone thought was the safest because that’s where 5-mile (8 kilometer) ramp winds downward in a spiral. It’s on the ramp’s periphery that the miners blasted open veins of gold.

For the first two weeks, no one knew whether “los 33″ were alive.

After contact was made, a team of government psychologists engaged them in a grand socially engineering scheme, dividing them into groups, setting their work and sleep schedule, restricting the television and movies they could see. The miners were even barred from receiving iPods along with everything else fed them through the 5 1/2-inch pipe that served as their lifeline to the surface.

The chief psychologist, Alberto Iturra, left little to chance and the assessment of the doctors who treated them was glowing. All the rest of the miners were expected to be out of the hospital Friday and over the weekend.

“We don’t see any problems of a psychological or a medical nature,” said Dr. Jorge Montes, deputy director of the Copiapo Regional Hospital.

Ramirez, as you’d expect from a man who embraces the risks of his profession, scoffed at the need for all the psychological treatment.

“When we first spoke to the miners down below … they weren’t in bad shape,” he said. “Psychologically, they weren’t in bad shape at all.”

But being thrust from the dark chambers of a gold mine into the limelight — and knowing how to cope with overnight fame — is quite another matter.

A few weeks before the rescue, its Codelco’s deputy coordinator, Rene Aguilar, explained to an AP reporter why so little video of the miners was being publicly released.

“This is not a reality TV show,” he said.

It could easily inspire one, though.

There was little doubt show pitches began germinating in Hollywood before the wheels on the escape capsule had a chance to cool.

No one before them had been trapped so long and survived.

Among the most compelling stories will be Luis Urzua’s — the shift foreman whose strict food rationing helped the miners stay alive until help came.

Based on new details the miners shared Thursday with their families, the rationing appears to have been even more extreme than previously thought.

“He told me they only had 10 cans of tuna to share, and water, but it isn’t true the thing about milk, because it was bad, out of date,” Alberto Sepulveda said after visiting his brother Dario.

Other family members were told the tuna amounted to about half a capful from the top of a soda bottle — and that the only water they could drink tasted of oil.

The miners told relatives Thursday their rescue ride was as smooth as a skyscraper elevator. The rescue had been planned meticulously to provide the utmost safety.

But the miners and rescuers decided on Wednesday to discard a few safety measures and the media were never informed. For instance, the plan to monitor the miners’ faces for panic with live video on the way up — and to have them in constant two-way communication with rescuers — was jettisoned at the last minute.

Rescuers abandoned both the in-capsule camera and fiber-optic cable that would have had to hang all the way down to the bottom of the 622-meter (680-yard) hole.

The men said they would be fine and just wanted out, said Fabricio Morales, a technician with Micomo, the telecommunications division of the state mining company Codelco that ran the rescue operation.

The cause of the collapse remains under formal investigation, but one senior Codelco official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AP that the mine’s owners had cut corners for years. “It lacked even a minimal amount of support beams.”

Ramirez acknowledged the corner cutting.

Twenty-seven of the 33 miners who were trapped are suing the owners.

The miners said it felt like an earthquake when the shaft finally collapsed above them, filling the lower reaches of the mine with suffocating dust. It took three hours before they could even begin to see, Urzua said.

Why any of them would go back underground may be hard for outsiders to understand. But most of these men have known no other work.

“Some of them will use other talents that they have — and can earn a lot of money now that they’re famous,” said Ramirez.

“But I think most will go back to the mines.”

An accident in central Chile on Thursday night reminded Ramirez’s countrymen of his job’s potential peril. A 26-year-old miner was crushed by rockfall at the Boton de Oro mine in Petorca state, its governor, Gonzalo Miquel, told state TV.

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Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Franklin Briceno, Peter Prengaman, Vivian Sequera and Eva Vergara contributed to this report.

Not far behind are the Discovery Channel and PBS. Both plan documentaries on the actual Chilean mine rescue by the end of the month.  The Discovery Channel will release “Rescued: The Chilean Mine Story” on Oct. 28. The documentary promises interviews with the miners, their families and even the Chilean president. PBS, on the other hand, will devote an episode of “Nova” to the disaster, and will focus more on the science side of the rescue, such as the thousand-plus engineers involved in the rescue efforts. That documentary will air Oct. 26. 

Not that there hasn’t been compelling footage on TV of the rescue already, such as this news story from Al Jazeera English:

And keep rubbing your palms in glee, media spectators, because Chilean miners apparently get more booty than a whole crew of Somali pirates. Barrios, who will obviously be played by Javier Bardem in the erotic thriller to come out of this, was likely not the only man from the shaft who got around a bit before his world caved in. As lucrative offers of worker’s compensation and media opportunities have flooded in over the past few weeks, a variety of women — many of whom seem not to have known of each other’s existences — have swarmed to the outpost known as Camp Hope. Red Cross worker Marta Flores told the UK Telegraph last month, “Some of the men have children from numerous women, and all of them have arrived here to stake their claim. I’ve met five families in this situation, but I’m sure there are more.” So good luck to the unnamed miner who reportedly has “a first wife he never divorced, his live-in partner, a mother of a child he had several years ago, and a woman who claims to be his current girlfriend” — and don’t expect to stay anonymous for long.

The men, who while still trapped underground worked out agreements on how to share the proceeds from their story and took teleconferenced classes on dealing with the media now face both the perks and the pitfalls of instant fame. This week, as the eyes of the world were on each of them as they blinked into the daylight for the first time in over two months, speculation ran high over what they would say and how did they look. And hey, didn’t they look a little too good or what? Astute observers were quick to note how relatively healthy and unstubbled they appeared. The clean-shaven miners, who had been receiving basic provisions like soap and toothpaste for weeks before their rescue, were, in the words of the Daily Beast’s Constantino Diaz-Duran, “looking fabulous.” Come to think of it, their “almost dashing” appearance in “their wraparound sunglasses” was “a clear example of how the power of human vanity can be as strong as our will to live.” Yes, the sunglasses and shaves were all about vanity. That, and the fact that hygiene is full of very humanizing ritual, and the men’s eyes hadn’t been exposed to daylight in almost 70 days.

On an early August day, 33 miners went off to work as regular men. Men with wives, girlfriends, and wives and girlfriends. Today they’re heroes, survivors and celebrities. So it’s no wonder — and it’s pretty funny — that “the Daily Show” has already dubbed the flamboyant, fist-pumping miner Mario Sepúlveda as “the Chilean Situation.” Maybe in the relief of dramatic rescue, there’s a reflective cultural need to keep survivors mortal, and a sweet release in being able to find things to laugh about in a story that could have been so disastrous. These guys don’t need to be put on a pedestal. But maybe anyone who’s spent almost 70 days half a mile below the earth doesn’t immediately need to be taken down a peg either.