New York Road Runners Is Starting a Free Running Program for High School Boys

New York Road Runners will open a free summer running program to boys in New York City high schools next year, modeled on its long-running program for teenage girls. The new one, NYRR Trailblazers, lasts six weeks, from June 28 to Aug. 7, 2027, and ends with the group racing their first 5K at the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K. NYRR announced it on Thursday alongside its annual impact report.

Registration opens on Jan. 19, 2027, for New York City residents who will be in grades 10 through 12, and nobody needs to have run or played a sport before. Along with the coaching, each participant gets New Balance shoes and running gear, an OMNY card to cover the subway or bus ride to practice, and snacks before and after sessions. The curriculum goes past the running itself, with workshops on goal setting, nutrition, mental well-being, self-awareness and body image. Families can sign up for updates on NYRR’s Trailblazers page.

NYRR Run for the Future, the girls’ version, celebrates its 15th anniversary this year and is still a small operation. It had 47 participants in the 2026 fiscal year, up from 29 the year before. Plenty of its graduates stick with the sport, though: NYRR counted 97 alumnae at 31 of its races and events over the year, and 20 of them ran the 2025 New York City Marathon.

“Trailblazers is about much more than training for a 5K,” NYRR CEO Rob Simmelkjaer said. “It’s about creating a supportive community where young men can build meaningful friendships, find mentorship, develop resilience, and gain the confidence to take on challenges.”

Loneliness is a large part of how NYRR is pitching the program, and it cites a figure of 25 percent of young men in the U.S. who say they feel lonely. That matches a Gallup survey published in May 2025, in which a quarter of American men aged 15 to 34 said they had felt lonely a lot of the previous day, compared with 18 percent of women the same age and a median of 15 percent for young men across OECD countries. At the start line, women are now the majority: they made up 53 percent of participants in races run through RunSignup in 2025, according to the registration platform’s race trends report.

Membership Passes 100,000

The impact report covers NYRR’s fiscal year from April 2025 through March 2026, and the number the organization put up front was membership. It finished the year with 101,139 members, 24 percent more than the 81,447 it had a year earlier and the first time it has gone past 100,000. Simmelkjaer said NYRR intends to keep expanding under “Believe in Every Step,” the brand platform it introduced in its January rebrand.

Total participation across its races and programs rose to 691,947, up 3.5 percent, and charity runners raised $91.9 million for 685 partner charities, compared with $79 million the year before. Nearly 28,000 volunteers put in close to 167,000 hours. It was also the year the 2025 New York City Marathon finished 59,226 runners, the most of any marathon ever held.

A lot of the pull toward membership runs through that race. NYRR’s 9+1 program guarantees marathon entry to members who complete nine qualifying races and one volunteer shift, and it became crowded enough that in August NYRR added a members-only drawing just to take part. Only about 1 percent of the more than 240,000 people who applied for the 2026 race through the general drawing got a place. Earlier this year NYRR also started holding back bibs in some races for runners who are not chasing the marathon at all.

Trailblazers is one of several projects NYRR listed for the current year. It is rebuilding the track at Star Spangled Playground in Brooklyn with New Balance, has expanded its RUNCENTER with a New Balance Run Hub, and is growing Race Free, which gives free race entries to qualifying New Yorkers. That program reached just over 1,000 people last year, and NYRR plans to double it to 2,000 and offer 4,000 entries.