Ariana Grande Wrote a Note for a Stranger Finishing the New York City Marathon

A runner named Ellie spent part of the 24th mile of Sunday’s New York City Marathon with Ariana Grande in her headphones. After the finish, she reached into a stranger’s envelope full of handwritten messages, picked one without looking, and pulled out the note Grande had written for a finisher that morning.

The envelope belongs to Ella Schweiger, a presenter and creator from Manchester, England, whose project, Ella’s Envelope, collects encouragement from strangers and passes it on to people they have never met. She traveled more than 3,000 miles to bring it to New York for race weekend. It was already holding hundreds of notes written by people around the world, and her plan was to add more from spectators on the day and give them out to runners once they had crossed the line.

Grande was out watching in Manhattan with her boyfriend, Ricky Alvarez, keeping a low profile behind a face mask with an iced coffee in hand, when Schweiger walked up and asked whether the two of them would write something. In the video Schweiger posted to Instagram on Monday, Grande agrees straight away and writes “You did it!” beside three small hearts, signing it “Ari + Ricky.”

Schweiger found Ellie later, past the finish, with an orange blanket around her shoulders, and held out the envelope. Ellie read her card aloud, signature and all, with no idea who Ari was until Schweiger told her, and then asked several times whether she was being serious. She had been running with music, and at mile 24 the song playing was Grande’s “The Way.” “It got me through,” she said.

Runners reach mile 24 in New York just after turning off Fifth Avenue into Central Park at 90th Street, at the top of a gradual climb of more than a mile that begins below Marcus Garvey Park, and there are still 2.2 miles to go. Our mile-by-mile breakdown of the course covers the stretch in detail.

When Schweiger asked what else had carried her through, Ellie pointed to the group who had come out to watch her. “Knowing that so many of my friends and family showed up. And the energy… I’ve never experienced anything like that,” she said. Some runners went to more trouble to make sure they had a crowd: in the week before the race, one New York runner offered strangers $120 each on Airtasker to make a sign with her name on it and cheer from an agreed spot on the course.

A record 61,146 runners finished Sunday’s race, the first marathon to pass 60,000 finishers, which was won by Andreas Almgren in 2:06:01 and by Sheila Chepkirui in 2:24:36. Most of the field will never know who wrote the notes Schweiger handed out, and she has been posting other deliveries from the day since, including one to a woman who was running her first marathon and doing it for her family.