The New York City Marathon, visualized
The New York City Marathon is right around the corner. The race is held annually on the first Sunday in November, which falls on November 1st in 2026. This year, I’ll be running it for the first time.
One unique thing about the NYC Marathon is that it’s one of few big marathons that makes detailed results available to download. Last year 59,122 people finished the race, the most in the race’s history.
Timing mats record every runner’s splits from mile 3 to the finish, and the New York Road Runners publishes the results. So naturally, I had to pull the data of the 58,721 finishers with complete records to visualize the race mile by mile.
Each dot is a finisher, green when running faster than their average pace and red when slower.
Let’s follow a typical runner who finished in .
Each dot is a finisher, green when running faster than their average pace and red when slower.
Let’s follow a typical runner who finished in .
The race starts on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the highest point of the course, and runners who finished near 4:30 ran the first three miles 6 percent faster than their average.
Through the flat miles of Brooklyn, they kept running 3 to 7 percent faster than their average.
They reached halfway, on the Pulaski Bridge, in 2:07:45, and the second half took them about 14 minutes longer.
On the Queensboro Bridge, miles 15 and 16, they ran slower than their average for the first time, and those two miles cost them about 48 seconds compared with miles 13 and 14.
On First Avenue they ran close to their average pace until mile 19, in East Harlem.
Mile 20, over the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx, was 10 percent slower than their average, and miles 21 to 23 stayed about that slow.
The climb up Fifth Avenue in mile 24 was their slowest mile, 13 percent slower than their average.
They ran the rolling last two miles through Central Park, and the typical runner in the group finished in 4:29:47.
Now, let’s take a look at the fastest and slowest runners. The women’s winner was the first runner to finish, at 10:54 a.m., when 26,617 runners had not yet started.
Both winners ran the second half faster than the first. The women’s winner ran halves of 1:11:01 and 1:08:50, and the men’s winner 1:05:19 and 1:02:50, finishing 18 minutes after her.
When the women’s winner finished, the last finisher was at mile 4.3, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and would be on the course for another 11 hours and 7 minutes.
By 6 p.m., 2,442 runners were left, spread over the last 8.5 miles of the course.
The last of the 59,122 finishers crossed the line at 10:01 p.m., 12 hours and 45 minutes after starting. They ran the first half in about 6 hours and 14 minutes and the second in about 6 hours and 31 minutes.
How hard is New York?
New York has a reputation for being a tough race. While bulk data from other major marathons isn’t easily downloadable, Chicago’s 2025 results are available. Chicago has a reputation for being one of the fastest and flattest major marathons. Compared to Chicago, New York certainly looks harder. The typical New York finisher took 4 hours and 24 minutes last year, 11 minutes longer than the typical finisher in Chicago three weeks earlier. Some of that gap is who runs each race, but a 2026 analysis that compared the same runners across 1.2 million marathon finishes found New York’s 2025 race about 4 minutes slower than Chicago’s for a three-hour marathoner.
New York runners also slowed more in the second half. Among men, only 7 percent ran a faster second half, compared with 10 percent in Chicago. Among women, 9 percent, compared with 12 percent in Chicago.
In New York, runners ran the first 13 miles 2 to 8 percent faster than their average pace, stayed within about 2 percent of it through mile 19, and ran every mile from 20 to 26 slower, by 4 to 11 percent.
Is it the hills?
Partly, though not because runners slow down much on the climbs. The famous hills aren’t the slowest miles. Runners ran the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the biggest climb on the course at about 140 feet, only about 1 percent slower than the flat miles after it, and the Queensboro Bridge about 3 percent slower than the two miles before it. The exception is Fifth Avenue. Mile 24 climbs about 90 feet alongside Central Park, and it was the slowest mile of the race, about 4 percent slower than the two miles before it.
The hills probably matter more through accumulated fatigue. Even though miles 21 to 23, from the Bronx through Harlem, are flat, runners ran them about 7 percent slower than their average. It probably doesn’t help that most runners wake up before sunrise to catch a ferry or bus to the start on Staten Island and wait hours before they start running, with the first runners starting around 9 a.m. and the last runners not starting until 11:41 a.m.
Pace is the typical runner’s in each split mile, compared with their own average for the race. Shading marks the climbs. Elevation is stretched vertically.
I’ll try to update this story with the 2026 results after this year’s race. Good luck to everyone running.