Jennifer Connelly and James Milner Are Among the Celebrities Running the New York City Marathon

Anyone planning to cheer on First Avenue on Nov. 1 might want to keep an eye out for Jennifer Connelly. The Academy Award winner is one of 60 notable runners New York Road Runners named on Tuesday for this year’s New York City Marathon, a list that also takes in former Giants running back Tiki Barber, the recently retired England midfielder James Milner and Queer Eye‘s Antoni Porowski.

Casey Neistat finished last year’s race in 2:57:41, according to NYRR’s results, and the filmmaker and YouTuber is one of several people on the list coming back with a New York time to beat. Zac Clark, the Bachelorette alum who founded Release Recovery, ran 3:27:33 that day, just under four minutes ahead of The Bachelor‘s Matt James (3:31:10). Jordan Litz, who is now playing Fiyero in Wicked in London, came through in 3:40:53, and Carl Radke of Summer House finished in 4:04:25. Oz Pearlman, the mentalist, may be the most accomplished runner of the lot: he has won the New Jersey Marathon four times, and in 2022 he covered more than 116 miles of Central Park loops in a single day. Our ranking of celebrity marathon times has how the faster names stack up historically.

William Goodge will arrive on Staten Island having already run 49 marathons in the previous 23 days. The British ultrarunner set off from Honolulu on Oct. 9 on what he calls Mission America, an attempt to run a marathon in every U.S. state inside 24 days, with New York as the 50th. The schedule published by Stand Up To Cancer, the charity he is raising money for, has him doubling and sometimes tripling up for the rest of the month, through Chicago, Miami and Boston, before he closes out October in Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine. He is after a Guinness World Records title and says every run will be logged with GPS files, two watches and photo and video from each state. His 2025 crossing of Australia broke the record on paper but drew questions from parts of the ultrarunning community. He is running in memory of his mother, Amanda, who died of cancer.

Joe Amabile is lining up less than three months after surgeons at NYU Langone removed a slow-growing tumor from his brain on Aug. 5. The Bachelor in Paradise alum was running 3 miles again only 15 days after the operation, the hospital said, and Nov. 1 will be his third New York City Marathon. He ran 3:49:53 here last year and is raising money for Release Recovery this time.

Rich Roll, the ultra-endurance athlete whose podcast Jenny Simpson recently used to talk through her ARVC diagnosis, is on the start list too, as are eight Peloton instructors, Robin Arzón and Matt Wilpers among them. AEW wrestler Darby Allin, former NFL player Justin Britt and Survivor season 48 winner Kyle Fraser are running, and the New York Times is sending its chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, and chief legal officer Diane Brayton with 10 colleagues to raise money for journalism education in the paper’s 175th year.

Many on the list are raising money for a charity, and NYRR has set itself a big target. The organization wants its Official Charity Partner Program, now in its 20th year, to raise $100 million in 2026, a target it has tied to the 50th anniversary of the first marathon through all five boroughs on Oct. 24, 1976. Chief executive Rob Simmelkjaer said the celebrities help “shine a spotlight on the sport and the power of movement to inspire and connect people.” They will be sharing the roads with close to 60,000 other runners, and all of them will be chasing the 2026 medal at the end of the five-borough course.

Every Notable Runner NYRR Has Named for 2026