The Runners Who Finished the 2026 New York City Marathon After Dark

Based on the 61,018 finishers mapped in this package.

Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. on race morning, and the sun set over Central Park at 4:52 p.m., seven hours and 42 minutes after the first wave started. Civil twilight, after which there is too little natural light to see clearly outdoors, ended at 5:21.

When the sun went down, 10,091 runners were still on the course, about one finisher in six. More than 8,000 of them were already on Fifth Avenue or inside Central Park, within three miles of the finish, but about 1,000 were still in the Bronx and nearly 1,000 more on First Avenue. By the end of civil twilight, 6,375 runners had yet to finish, most of them around mile 24.

Those who finished after sunset were a different field from the one that started the day. Two thirds were women, against 47 percent of all finishers, and their median age was 40, four years older than the field as a whole. Nearly nine in ten had started in the fifth wave, at 11:30 a.m.

The course thinned slowly. At 6:52 p.m., two hours after sunset, 3,313 runners were still out; at 7:52, 863; at 8:52, 156. The last finisher crossed the line at 9:52 p.m., almost five hours after dark.