The 2024 TCS New York City Marathon is nearly upon us. The barricades are going up around Central Park. The gel packs are being readied in apartments across the city. The carb-loading has begun in the city's best restaurants. More than 50,000 runners from New York City and across the globe will hit the streets on Sunday, November 3, to raise money for charities, chase personal goals, and have a ton of fun as the city turns into a party.
Among the crowd, expect to see a few familiar faces. These stars, from TV, film, sports, and entertainment will test their personal mettle to the test as they try to earn a medal for running 26.2 miles across all five boroughs. If you want to cheer them on, here’s our guide to the best places to watch. You can also follow along with their times on the NYC Marathon app.
Celebrities Running the 2024 New York City Marathon
The brain behind Public Opinion, the delightful street-side trivia gameshow, is running the marathon this weekend. Coyne, who is our cover star this month, described his preparation to Time Out New York as “a very life affirming thing.”
Content creator Jaeki Cho of Righteous Eats is running the marathon, and obviously he complied a great video of his favorite places to carb load.
She’s used to running interviews on 20/20 and Good Morning America, but this Sunday, Amy Robach will be running the marathon course.
The broadcast personality who became popular on CNN will be on the course, too.
Famed YouTube blogger Casey Neistat has hopes to hit his goal time of 2 hours 59 minutes. He made a hilariously detailed video about why he won’t be waving to anyone on the route as a way to save his energy. Though he would love for you to wave to him, he won’t be waving back. “No waving = Victory,” as he says. We’re rooting for you to get your PR, Casey! His race will support Project Healthy Minds.
You may know her from her stand-up comedy, her acting, or as the co-star of the hit podcast turned HBO series 2 Dope Queens. And now you'll know her as a marathon runner.
On the stage, she’s portrayed Glinda in Wicked, Sherrie in Rock of Ages, and Rose in Titanique, so she’s definitely got impressive lung capacity to fuel her marathon. Carrie St. Louis is supporting Broadway Cares/Equity Fighting Aids.
The mega popular Columbian singer will support Keep a Child Alive.
The NBC News Political and National Correspondent will make his first marathon attempt “to warm up for Election Day coverage,” as he joked on Instagram. The journalist will support Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles.
The host of MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show, Schulman suffered a major bike accident earlier this year and broke his neck. As he said on Instagram, “The voice in my head keeps reminding me I’m just lucky to be here. Feeling blessed that I get another chance to run the NYC Marathon November 3rd.” His race will support Achilles International, which helps people with disabilities through athletic programs and social connection.
The athlete and influencer is the wife of professional golfer Collin Morikawa. She’s supporting St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
The actor is best known for his role as Louis Huang in the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat will support KultureCity, a nonprofit dedicated to making spaces sensory inclusive and accessible.
The soap opera actor plays Kevin Fisher on The Young and the Restless and played Leo Stark on Days Of Our Lives. He’s running for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
The former NCAA football player is best known for being the first Black male lead for The Bachelor. He shared a video of tips for marathon runners below.
Fellow Bachelor star Peter Weber is also running.
And so is Zac Clark, of The Bachelorette.
And Joe Amabile of The Bachelorette, too.
The Bachelorette contestant turned TV personality is running with Team Maybelline.
Model Haley Kalil, whose hilarious Instagram describes herself as “Just a sarcastic gal in NY” is running with Team Maybelline.
The popular beauty influencer and entrepreneur is also on Team Maybelline.
Remember Vinny from Jersey Shore? He’s running. He was in NYC a few weeks ago for the Trump rally.
The actress who played Emma Gilbert in the fantasy series H₂O: Just Add Water is running on Team Maybelline.
The Marathon Course
Here is the official start timeline for Sunday:
- Professional wheelchair division: 8:00 a.m.
- Handcycle category and Select Athletes with Disabilities: 8:22 a.m.
- Professional Women’s open division: 8:35 a.m.
- Professional Men: 9:05 a.m.
- Five amateur waves go off every 35 minutes starting at 9:10 a.m. and ending at 11:30 a.m.
2024 TCS New York City Marathon Weather
Forecasts indicate that competitors will be treated with sunny skies during the race and experience temperatures of 45 degrees at 8 a.m. with a high of 57 expected at 3 p.m. across New York City’s five boroughs. Perfect running temperatures are believed to be between 40 and 60 degrees. “If temperatures are a little bit cooler, around 45 degrees, it’s found that runners run faster and have a faster overall time,” Fox Weather Meteorologist Stephen McCloud told The Post last year. “Coolish type weather favors runners.”
Defending Champions
Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia and Hellen Obiri of Kenya will defend their titles after winning the 2023 marathon last year. Tola set the course record of 2:04:58 in his win and later won gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics with a time of 2:06:26.
“I’m excited to defend my title in New York, especially coming off an Olympic-record marathon performance,” Tola told WorldAthletics.org. “The hilly course and crowds in Paris definitely prepared me well for the bridges and spectators in New York, where maybe I can go even faster this year.”
Tola faces tough competition in the men’s category as two-time Olympic medalist Bashir Abdi joins a crowded field of decorated runners that includes three past NYC Marathon winners, all from Kenya. Evans Chebet, the 2022 champion is joined by countrymen, Albert Korir, the 2021 winner, and Geoffrey Kamworor, who was victorious in 2017 and 2019.
On the women’s side, Obiri, who earned bronze at this year’s Olympics, won her title in 2:27:23. Last year, Obri became the first female in 34 years to win the Boston Marathon and the NYC Marathon in the same calendar year. She defended her title in Boston in April.
“There’s no place like New York, and I am so ready to defend my title,” Obiri told World Athletics. “I have been racing very well on the roads in the US, and I hope I can have another good day that sees me in contention once we enter the final stages in Central Park.”
Obiri is joined by fellow countrywomen Sharon Lokedi, 2022 winner, and Edna Kiplagat, 2010 champion.
The Marathon's Most Inspirational Story
Queens resident Joel Kaufman returns to the course a year after making a name for his placement — on the complete opposite end of the results sheet of Tola and Obiri.
Kaufman’s race time of 8 hours, 43 minutes and 34 seconds just after 8 p.m. marked him the dead last finisher for last year’s event. “I got a call the next day from New York Road Runners,” Kaufman told The Post about the organization that produces the 26.2-mile race. “[They] said, ‘You’re the official last finish.’ I said, ‘That is so great. I got a title that nobody can take away from me.’ It’s not like being the 57,000th finisher.”
Kaufman, who has walked the race for the past decade to support people battling leukemia and lymphoma blood cancers, had a pace of 19 minutes and 59 seconds per mile. The 66-year-old retired high school math teacher who goes by “Whammy” will be back for Sunday’s marathon — and will start at 9:10 a.m. alongside the three-hour marathoners as a nod to his inspirational story.
Street Closures During the Marathon
The marathon is set to hit the streets of the Big Apple on Sunday, shutting down major roads and bridges across the city.
If you're driving in any of the five boroughs on Sunday, these road closures may impact you. Click HERE for more information about street closures.
Running the NYC Marathon: What It's Really Like
It claims to be the largest marathon in the world, and yet, it cannot accommodate all the interest. Roughly 4 percent of people who entered a raffle to run the 2024 New York City Marathon will get the chance on Sunday to wind through five boroughs and over five bridges all the way to Central Park. The rejection email sent out in March to many tens of thousands of marathon hopefuls featured a photo at the top of a runner in an orange singlet that read “Nick” cheerfully flashing finger guns at the camera—finger guns he “used to shoot down our hopes and dreams,” as one woman put it. “I’m the most hated person in running,” Nick Parisi, the unwitting man in the photo, told NBC New York. Ironically, Parisi himself didn’t initially get into the marathon either. The CEO of New York Road Runners, which puts on the marathon every year, had to do damage control for the situation, presenting Parisi with guaranteed entry and a custom race bib.
So, spots in the NYC Marathon are coveted. But let me tell you what running that race is really like, as someone who enjoys marathons enough to have completed three, plus a “virtual marathon” in fall 2020, and an ultramarathon that was 32 miles long. To run the New York City Marathon is to be tracked by your friends and loved ones (and, possibly, enemies?) on an app, while you are screamed at for three to six hours straight. The course, famously, has basically no breaks from the crowds of spectators—the bridges are the only stretches that are quiet. And wow, by the end of it, did I wish everyone watching would just shut up.
I don’t hate spectatorship, per se. In fact, one of the great joys in this life is getting the chance to literally cheer someone on, or to be cheered on yourself. When I ran that “virtual marathon”—a marathon where you pay money for a medal but just run the distance on your own—I was so worried about how I’d fare without encouragement and general camaraderie that I wrote mantras on notecards ahead of the race. Each time I completed a mile, I’d pull a card out of the stack, which I kept in a pocket on my hydration pack. I drew inspiration from the signs that I’d seen people hold up at previous marathons I’d run in Toronto and Miami: You got this, You’re amazing, that kind of energy. Undiluted praise and faith—it’s powerful.
Sometimes, spectators hand you fun snacks: I will never forget the mini pretzels one person was offering runners somewhere around Mile 22 of my first marathon. I was so sick of the sugary gel packets that are staples at these events and yet needed food so badly that I didn’t think twice about sticking my hand directly into a tub that was probably, by that point, 3 percent sweat by volume. When I ran the NYC Marathon a couple years ago, a stranger in Queens gave me a small can of Coke, a boost I badly needed. The fact that someone came out to watch with a six-pack of soda to offer runners: That’s race magic.
In this city, though, watching the marathon seems to be even more of a sport than running it. Many people have annual plans to get together with friends and post up at a specific spot. For the past six years, I’ve lived on the course itself, and have even loved getting to watch runners go by with my neighbors. In the lead up to my marathon race day, when loose acquaintances identified me as someone who was running the marathon, they got excited. “I’ll track you!,” said one, pulling out the app on her phone, where you can type in the name of anyone running and watch their little dot move along the course in real time. At first, I felt like a celebrity, and it was fun. Then, I felt like a celebrity, and it was bad. After I finished the race, I learned that family members had also tracked me. Yes, it was very sweet to get a text from someone I love right after I crossed the finish line. But knowing people—anyone, actually!—could have been watching me the whole time? No thanks. After the race, my boss reported that she’d seen me pass by on the Upper East Side, while at the annual marathon watching party she attends. I was walking at that point! I don’t want people I know to see me walking!
As I ran the almost-final stretch of the race down through Central Park, I felt a sensation of the crowds, which were on either side of the path, starting to close in. I hadn’t had a good run that day, and the cheering felt like it was mocking me, more than anything. For over 20 miles, I’d seen the same iterations of jokes on signs—about runners being crazy, and bodily functions, and “Run like Brad Pitt is at the finish line!”—over and over and over. Some people held giant, blown-up faces of their loved ones who were running, which is cute the first few times you see it and then the faces are, well, giant faces staring at you in your delirium. I run to get away from it all. This experience was the opposite of that.
You might correctly point out that hardly anyone was really paying attention to me, and those that were were only doing so fleetingly. But the sensation of being at the very center of all the commotion and attention, and feeling the pressure to perform well, was still there for me. Again, the attention directed at the runners never lets up. The cheering isn’t a break from any other state of being. It’s all cheering. I am a person who generally thinks of myself as liking attention. But participating in this race was like getting caught with a cigarette, and then being told I had to smoke the whole pack.
There are plenty of races that aren’t like this. In fact, I’d estimate that almost all of them aren’t like this. One of my favorite races is the United Airlines NYC half marathon, which happens every March. It draws fun crowds in a few spots, including as you run through Times Square toward the end of the course, but it also includes a blissful, quiet stretch on FDR Drive, which is free of cars for the morning. And then, there are the races like the next race that I did after that NYC Marathon. That one was outside of Tampa, Florida, in the woods. It had fewer than 100 participants. We started before dawn, wearing headlamps. I brought my headphones, but I didn’t end up playing any music. I talked a little bit with other runners, and overheard snippets of chatter from volunteers, and stopped to take pictures of plants a couple times. I ate gummy bears and peanut butter sandwiches from my backpack, and listened to my breath. I spent nearly seven hours running that course, just existing. Which is to say: If you were rejected from running the NYC Marathon, maybe you’ve found a race to run instead that you’ll like better.
The New York City Marathon is a feat. I am in awe of the people who shut down the roads and set up the infrastructure and generally coordinate this giant, hulking athletic event. It’s been going on for over 50 years, with many runners having participated upwards of a dozen times. May everyone who really wants to experience it get the opportunity to. And if you are out there running this year, I’ll be on the sidelines, rooting for you—and yelling.
