NYC Marathon 2026: Nearly 60,000 Runners Made This the Biggest Field in Race History
The champions led the way, but the story behind them was size: nearly 60,000 runners — the most ever — poured across the five boroughs on Sunday for the 50th running of the five-borough race.
The fastest runners in the world finished before noon. The biggest story of the 2026 New York City Marathon may be everyone who came behind them: nearly 60,000 runners took part on Sunday, the most ever for this race, according to reports on the record field published as the results came in.
Those runners led — in the literal sense — by Sweden's Andreas Almgren and Kenya's Sheila Chepkirui, whose winning runs this station has reported in full, spread out from Staten Island in five waves beginning at 8 a.m. and were still crossing the Central Park finish hours later. A field of nearly 60,000 is not a crowd a city absorbs quietly: it is 26.2 miles of closed streets, five bridges, and, by the organizers' own weekend arithmetic, hundreds of sanitation workers waiting behind the last runner to hand the streets back.
Sunday was also an anniversary running: the 50th running of the race, and the first time in more than a decade that the five-borough course itself changed, with a rerouted mile through the Bronx that this station covered on Saturday and Sunday morning.
The record field is the number the day will be remembered by alongside the winning times. New York has run this race through heat, cold, a hurricane cancellation and a pandemic cancellation; on a clear, cold morning in 2026, more people ran it than ever before.
