For The First Time In 15 Years, the New York City Marathon Has Changed Its Route

New York Road Runners has redrawn a mile of the New York City Marathon course through the Bronx, so that people in Mott Haven can get to their supermarket and their laundromat while the race is on.

Runners cross the Willis Avenue Bridge into the borough, turn left onto East 135th Street and right onto Alexander Avenue, as they always have. The new line starts there. Instead of peeling off at East 138th Street, they hold Alexander as far as East 141st Street, turn left, then left again onto Third Avenue, and finally right onto East 138th Street, which feeds them onto the Madison Avenue Bridge and out of the borough. That is five turns where the old mile had seven.

The block the old course closed to traffic sits on East 140th Street. A Western Beef supermarket and a laundromat that never closes are on it, and until this year the race ran a loop around them, up Morris Avenue and out onto Rider Avenue. The Patterson Houses, just under 1,800 apartments, sit across Morris Avenue from both, and for much of race day getting to either one meant timing it around the runners. The change was reported by the New York Times, which spoke to people who use the block and to race director Ted Metellus.

Metellus, a Bronx native who serves as New York Road Runners’ race director and chief event production officer, told the Times that the course moved chiefly to put the two businesses back within reach on race day. He tied it to what the area lacks: “those sections of the Bronx are food deserts.” A Sunday race, he added, falls on the day the block does most of its errand trade. Two options went to the city and the New York Police Department, and neither could be used without their approval.

The course was also up for recertification this year, and the talks with city officials and with the neighborhood ran in the lead-up to that. American road courses are certified by USA Track and Field, and those certificates expire 10 years after the year they are issued, with no renewal available. A lapsed course has to be measured from scratch before it can be used for records or qualifying times, which meant measurers were due on the Bronx stretch in 2026 whether or not the route moved.

For anyone racing it, the redraw lands at one of the least forgiving points on the course. The Bronx mile arrives between miles 20 and 21, which is where marathoners traditionally hit the wall. Seven turns packed into that stretch meant seven rounds of braking, re-accelerating and hunting for the tangent at the exact moment in a marathon when runners are least equipped to do any of it. Losing two of them will not rescue anybody’s finishing time, though it does make an awkward mile easier to run. The distance itself does not change: the course still measures 26.2 miles.

The Bronx leg has not always been a mile. Metellus told the Times that the 1976 course dipped into the borough and straight back out over the two bridges the race still uses, with what he described as “a quick loop around a light pole” in between. Metellus said the Bronx borough president asked, once that first race was done, for more of the race inside his borough.

New York Road Runners has spent 2026 marking 50 years since the marathon left Central Park for all five boroughs, and 59,226 runners finished last November’s race, a record for the event. The new Bronx mile gets its first outing on Nov. 1.