Almost 25,000 people took to the streets of Brooklyn for the NYCRUNS Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon on Sunday – a record number for the race, which started in its current iteration in 2023.
A total of 24,461 runners crossed the finish line in Prospect Park after running 13.1 miles through Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Downtown Brooklyn, according to NYCRUNS founder Steve Lastoe, almost 3,000 more than completed the race last year.
“Put it in the books!” Lastoe said in a statement. “Everyone was a winner today as a record number of runners experienced Brooklyn at its best, from the great neighborhoods we ran through to the spectacular sights we saw to the juiced-up crowds cheering the runners on along the way. We can’t wait to do it all over again in 2026!”
Brooklynite Ryan Cutter won the Men’s Division, finishing the race in just 1:06:55. Winter Parts, from Pennsylvania, won the Nonbinary Division with a time of 1:15:15, and Manhattanite Fanny Fredriksson took home the Women’s Division title with a time of 1:20:42, her fourth NYCRUNS women’s division half marathons win in the last year. Queens resident Ricardo Corral won the handcycle division in 59:39.
NYCRUNS bills the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon as “the nation’s fastest-growing race.” The event began as the NYCRUNS Brooklyn Marathon in 2011. That year, just 262 runners competed in the race, which was held entirely inside Prospect Park. In 2018, the org added the half marathon event. In 2023, they discarded the full marathon and embraced the half as its own standalone race.
Since then, the race has more than doubled in size — in 2023, just 11,721 people participated.
It has also gotten a new name. Up until January, the race was called the NYCRUNS Brooklyn Half Marathon — but as the race grew in size in popularity, more and more runners began to confuse it with the New York Road Runners Brooklyn Half Marathon, according to a trademark lawsuit filed last year. In the suit, NYRR accused NYCRUNS of purposefully misleading runners by choosing such a similar name, and claimed the org was infringing on its trademark.
At the start of this year, NYCRUNS and NYRR settled out of court when NYCRUNS agreed to rebrand its Kings County half marathon as the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon.
Next year’s Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon has already been scheduled for April 26, 2026, and NYCRUNS is offering a limited-time $99 registration fee.
