Who Passed the Most Runners at the 2026 New York City Marathon

Based on 61,018 of the 61,060 official finishers. Passing counts cover the amateur field.

A pass, in this analysis, is one runner moving ahead of another on the road between two timing mats. Across the race there were about 282 million of them. A quarter came in the first three miles, as runners who crossed the start line at different moments sorted themselves out over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and into Bay Ridge.

After that, passing was spread fairly evenly along the course, rising on First Avenue at miles 18 and 19, where runners who had paced themselves well moved through those who were starting to fade.

Which wave a runner started in mattered as much as how fast they were. The median runner in the first wave passed about 2,200 people and was passed by about 2,300, and fewer than half finished ahead of where they started. In the four later waves, the median runner passed between 4,400 and 5,300 people, and about three in five gained places.

All ten of the biggest passers started in the fifth and final wave, at 11:30 a.m., and spent the day working through the field. The runner who passed the most, Kenneth S., a 36-year-old from Gastonia, N.C., passed 27,199 runners on the way to a 3:38:01 finish and was passed by 490. Another fifth-wave runner, Wojciech U., 37, of Poland, passed 26,940 and was passed by just one. At the other end, the runners passed most often were first-wave starters who finished in about eight hours, each passed by nearly 55,000 people.

Waves are assigned from the finish time each runner predicts, and many missed their prediction in one direction or the other. About one in five runners in the second to fifth waves finished faster than the typical runner in the wave ahead of theirs, and 213 fifth-wave starters broke four hours. In the other direction, a quarter of first-wave runners finished slower than the typical second-wave runner, and 1,245 of them took more than five hours.