New York Marathon: Running Through the City That Never Sleeps

Maybe some of the biggest things in life happen exactly this way: you do not first become the person who is completely ready to do them. You simply begin, and somewhere along the way you realize that you have already become her.

The same goes for crazy little ideas, because that is what people would have called mine when I said I was moving to NYC just three months before the marathon. Whatever we called it, my decision was already firm, and I was happy to have the chance to live through such a rich new experience. At that moment, that was the only thing that mattered to me.

I believe that almost every run, whether it is a race or a training session, leaves you with a slightly different — and, without false modesty, better — version of yourself than the one who stood at the start or began that day's workout.

When I think about marathon day now, my finishing time is certainly part of the memory, but long before the numbers I see a sunny, crisp and beautiful morning in New York; thousands of people around me; myself eating two XXL plain Dunkin' donuts at the start and washing them down with American coffee because everyone else seemed to be doing it (??); flags and languages from every corner of the world; a hopeless attempt to find my friends from Serbia among the endless crowd of like-minded people; bridges I had no idea I would remember so vividly; strangers who stood beside the course for hours and cheered as if they had come specifically to wait for you; the crisis that caught up with me somewhere around kilometer 35; and, at the end of it all, Central Park, where I cried because of how far I had come.

The New York Marathon was one of the most beautiful days of my life because it did not begin that morning and it did not end when I crossed the finish line. In just a few hours, it brought together all the months of preparation — even though I would say I had not devoted myself to them seriously enough — that imperfect discipline, and the decision to keep going long enough to find myself at the start of one of the world's greatest marathons on a November morning.

From Central Park to Nearly 60,000 People With the Same Goal

If I had researched the history of the New York City Marathon in detail before the race, I would probably have felt even greater respect for everything I was about to become a small part of that day.

Only later did I read more closely that the first New York City Marathon was held in 1970 entirely inside Central Park, with just 127 runners at the start, a one-dollar entry fee and only 55 finishers. Six years later, the marathon left Central Park and connected all five boroughs for the first time, creating the route that now brings people from all over the world to New York so that one day they can say they crossed the Verrazzano, ran through Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan, and finished where the whole story once began: Central Park.

In 1978, Grete Waitz ran what was then a world record of 2:32:30 in New York, in her very first marathon. She would go on to win the race nine times. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the marathon was held less than two months later and became one of the symbols of a city trying to stand back up.

And then, in 2025, another 59,226 names from 130 countries joined that same story. One of them was mine.

I think that is exactly one of the things that makes a marathon special: here, history is not something you watch from behind a barrier. You receive a number, stand at the start and become a tiny part of it.

Eliud Kipchoge, Kenenisa Bekele, Benson Kipruto, Hellen Obiri and some of the greatest names in distance running raced along those same streets. That day, Obiri broke a 22-year-old course record and won in 2:19:51, while Benson Kipruto claimed the closest men's finish in the race's history.

Somewhere behind them was me, a girl who had set out from Bosnia and Herzegovina and did not belong to the professional running world, but who had the right that day to the same course, the same bridges, the same finish in Central Park and the same medal when it was all over.

There is something democratic in that, too. In a stadium, we usually watch the best athletes in the world from the stands. At the great marathons, we run on their course.

The Morning You Stop Imagining the New York Marathon and Start Running It

My marathon morning began back in New Jersey, where I set off for the official start on Staten Island. The closer I came to Fort Wadsworth, the clearer it became that I was no longer just someone who had spent months saying she was preparing for the NYC Marathon. The day had finally arrived — the reason behind every long run, every early morning, every tired thought squeezed between work, life and training, far from my city, family and friends, in a process that sometimes seemed completely pointless even to me, let alone to people who do not run.

Around me were runners from every part of the world, and each of them had brought their own version of the journey to that morning onto Staten Island. Only later, when I read the stories of people with whom I had shared the course that day, did I understand how much greater some of those stories were than anything I could have guessed while looking at the crowd around me.

Somewhere among us was Juan Pablo Dos Santos, who had lost both legs in a traffic accident and covered New York's 42 kilometers on prostheses, reaching Central Park after midnight and more than fifteen hours on the course. Paralympian Ali Truwit was racing that day as well, only two years after losing part of her leg in a shark attack. Nothing is quite what it seems — not even me. You begin to see the crowd differently: behind one bib may be a return from injury, behind another an illness, behind a third years of trying. Someone woke before work to finish a session, someone ran after the children fell asleep, someone raised money for a person they love, and someone may have had to learn to walk again before they could even begin to think about a marathon.

Verrazzano and the First Moment You Understand Where You Are

The opening kilometers take you over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and it immediately makes sure you understand that the New York City Marathon will not be a flat sightseeing jog through the city. The route climbs from the start, yet your legs barely register the incline because, for the first time, you are looking at a scene you had previously seen only in photographs and other runners' videos.

Only when you raise your eyes and see the river of people crossing the bridge, then turn around and realize there are just as many behind you, do you understand the scale of what you are part of. I think that was the first moment it truly crossed my mind that I had reached the day that had existed for months as nothing more than a date on the calendar.

I do not remember thinking about pace then, or trying to analyze how I felt and what might happen in ten, twenty or thirty kilometers. More than anything, I wanted to let myself be present in the moment of crossing one of the most famous starts in the marathon world and entering Brooklyn.

Brooklyn and the City That Does Not Simply Watch the Race

I had previously lived and trained in New York for a few months and had the chance to get to know its running community, so the city was not entirely unfamiliar when I stood at the start. But only during Marathon Sunday did I understand what people truly mean when they say the New York City Marathon is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it.

Brooklyn in particular makes you feel that the marathon is not a sporting event that merely happens to be taking place in the city that day. Instead, the whole of New York seems to have collectively decided that the day belongs to the runners. Music pours out of bars and shops, people stand on the sidewalks for hours, children hold their hands toward the course, and someone reads your name and starts shouting it with such conviction that for a moment you forget you have never seen that person before. Every new block brings another song, sign or group of people who seem to have only one task: send you a few hundred meters farther.

New York normally has an incredible ability to make you feel small. That day, for the first time, I felt the exact opposite — as if one of the largest cities in the world had made enough room for every one of us and for all the small, personal reasons we had chosen to run 42 kilometers through it.

Not Every Kilometer of the New York Marathon Was Mine Alone

There was another reason I did not want to reduce my NYC Marathon experience to a result: I ran through New York as part of a fundraising campaign for the Iskra Parent House in Banja Luka, which supports children undergoing cancer treatment and their families.

Katarina and I had begun that humanitarian story earlier through the Health Beyond Borders campaign, with a simple idea: to turn the kilometers we voluntarily choose to run into something useful for people who did not choose the far more difficult marathons they face. That is why this marathon carried a meaning for me that could never fit inside a finishing time or a medal.

We train for a marathon for months. We know the exact date it will begin and, if everything goes well, roughly when it will end. We have a training plan and people waiting for us at the finish or at home. Yet some families begin the hardest marathons of their lives without preparation, without a plan and without knowing how long they will last. That perspective helped me turn my kilometers into something larger than they truly are.

Sport Vision Bosnia and Herzegovina also supported me along that road, which made me even happier that the whole story did not remain simply my private trip to one of the world's great races. Instead, it connected people and organizations from Bosnia and Herzegovina with a day I will remember for the rest of my life.

New York's Bridges and the Kilometers When the Marathon Starts Talking to You

The New York Marathon passes through five boroughs, and it is the bridges that keep reminding you throughout the race that this city will not allow all 42.195 kilometers to pass easily. Every crossing changes the rhythm, brings another climb and then opens a new part of the city, so it feels as though one great race is made up of several smaller stories unfolding one after another.

At first, you experience those changes almost as a tourist and marvel at the fact that you are literally running through New York. But as you approach the final third of the marathon, less and less energy remains for looking around, while more and more attention turns to what your legs, stomach and mind are telling you.

Sooner or later, a marathon comes to collect what it is owed, no matter how prepared you are, how disciplined your training has been or how well you control your pace. Mine knocked more seriously somewhere around kilometer 35.

At Kilometer 35, New York Became Quiet

Until then, I had been taking in the city, the music, the cheering and the people around me. But at some point all that noise became something I could no longer absorb in the same way. My legs knew very clearly how many kilometers they had behind them, and my mind began making the calculation you never want to allow it to make during a marathon.

I did not have a cinematic moment in which I suddenly found new strength and continued as if there were not 35 kilometers behind me, nor did I try to convince myself that nothing hurt. I simply accepted that after so many kilometers my legs had every right to be tired, and that my task was not to feel as I had at kilometer ten again, but to continue with whatever I had in that moment.

Beneath the fatigue, however, there was one feeling all along that was much stronger: an enormous happiness that I was healthy, that I was there that day, that I was running through New York, that I had come from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the start of one of the world's greatest marathons and, perhaps most of all, that I had completed the entire training process that made it possible for me to stand at kilometer 35 at all — fortunate enough to complain only that my legs hurt.

Once I understood that, the pain did not magically disappear and I did not become rested. But I continued running while tired and grateful to life at the same time. I think that was the moment I best understood what the entire preparation process had been trying to teach me. The point of a marathon is not to feel good for 42 kilometers. It is to have enough reasons to continue when the part arrives in which you no longer do.

Central Park and the Kilometer When I Stopped Thinking About the Finish

As you approach Central Park, you begin to feel the city closing around the final kilometers and realize there is little room left for calculations. Everything that had been training, plans, long runs, pace, sleep, nerves and anticipation for months is suddenly only minutes away from becoming something complete.

Somewhere around kilometer 41, I began to cry — not because I could no longer continue, but because for the first time that day I understood with absolute certainty that I could, and that there was too little distance left for New York to take that marathon away from me.

A volunteer beside the course saw me crying and came over immediately, probably expecting a cramp, dizziness or one of the countless problems she sees during the final kilometers of a marathon. I had no idea how to explain that I was actually more than fine and was crying only because I had finally understood how far I had come.

I had roughly one kilometer left, and I was no longer thinking about how much distance remained but about everything it had taken to reach that kilometer. No single training session could have brought me to Central Park on its own. What did it were the entirely ordinary decisions to go out and do what I had promised myself, even when none of those decisions seemed special or worth remembering by itself.

The marathon simply joined them into one line, 42.195 kilometers long.

The Most Beautiful Part of a First Marathon May Not Be the Finish at All

When people talk about a first marathon or one of the World Marathon Majors, it is natural to think mostly about the race itself, the medal and the moment of crossing the finish line. But New York left me with something slightly different. After everything, I realized that most of my happiness that day did not come from the fact that I had finished a marathon, but from knowing I had become someone persistent enough to reach it.

The preparation and the leap into the unknown were not merely the price I had to pay for one beautiful day in New York. They were part of that beautiful day. Without all the weeks that came before, Central Park would not have carried the same meaning, the Verrazzano would have been only a bridge, kilometer 35 only a difficult kilometer, and the medal just another object brought home afterward.

That is why I would probably not tell people who want to run their first NYC Marathon, another major, any marathon or even their first 5K to wait for the moment when they feel like real marathoners or runners — completely prepared and certain they know what they are doing. Even that morning on Staten Island, I was still trying to grasp the scale of everything happening around me. A few hours later, I was someone who had just finished the 2025 New York City Marathon.

For all those reasons, I remember the New York Marathon not only as my first great marathon story, nor simply as one of the World Marathon Majors I wanted to finish, but as one of the most beautiful days of my life: a day when I spent several hours running through the city that never sleeps and had the unusual good fortune, in the middle of all that noise, all those people and all those kilometers, to hear very clearly how worthwhile it is to persist in something that matters to you.