Marathon Medallion Will Remind Runners of the Course

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll take a close look at the new medallion that runners will receive when they finish the New York City Marathon on Sunday. We’ll also get details on what the looming cutoff of food stamps will mean for older New Yorkers.

The runners in the New York City Marathon on Sunday may be too sweaty, thirsty, achy or stiff to look closely at the keepsake they will be handed when they reach the finish line in Central Park. It’s a little medallion made of zinc with an electroplated gold finish.

The designers at New York Road Runners who came up with it say it will let finishers feel with their fingers what they felt with their feet as they dashed across bridges and up and down avenues on Sunday. The medallion is ringed by an abstract, symbolic representation of the course.

The designers shrank the length from 26.2 miles to about 10¼ inches and wound it around the edge of the medallion. That reduced the representations of the terrain to tiny fractions — around eight millimeters for the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The real thing, at 228 feet above sea level, is the highest point in the race.

Some people think of cities as flat, but New York “is not that flat,” said Keziah Makoundou, the design lead for New York Road Runners, which stages the race. Marathoners learn the hard way that there are ups and downs in New York, and for them, the Verrazzano is the first mountain to cross, less than a mile from the starting line.

“The Queensboro, from what I hear, is also a challenging one because it’s much later in the race,” said Thomas Cabus, the creative director of New York Road Runners. “People tend to struggle on that one.”

For runners, by nonrunners

Makoundou and Cabus are not runners themselves.

“But I don’t feel that you necessarily need to be a runner to be able to design something that will speak to the runner,” Makoundou said.

All 50,000 runners in the marathon will be given a medallion. The winners in the men’s and women’s open and wheelchair divisions also get a separate gold medallion and a foot-high sterling silver trophy designed by Tiffany & Company. The second- and third-place finishers are given silver and bronze medallions. There is also $969,000 in prize money for runners in the invited professional athlete field.

Makoundou said this was the first time the Road Runners had taken a design element from running. Cabus said that previous years’ medallions told “a story of the five boroughs that you cross through the course,” using “little illustrations and landmarks from each borough.” This time, “instead of showing buildings, you’re actually feeling the course again.”

“We really wanted the runners to have a tactile experience,” he said. “They can touch it and say, ‘Oh, wow, there was this mountain,’ or here, ‘That’s where I struggled.’”

What runners think

Emily Balcetis, an associate professor at New York University, researched what runners are thinking when that happens. The faster runners are thinking about specific milestones, not bigger issues like why they took up running in the first place. “They could be focused on the turn ahead, the person’s shorts who is one or two blocks ahead of them and running at a faster pace, or a building they can see up on the horizon,” she said.

Balcetis, the lead writer on a paper about the tactics runners use to keep going that was published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, said the findings did not match her own experience as a runner. Novice runners, she said, try to motivate themselves by thinking about big goals, like “running to be ready for my summer body” or “running to manage my anxieties.”

Faster runners don’t think that way. “They’re thinking about what am I doing right now, rather than why am I doing this,” she said.

Where to watch the marathon? Here are the best places to go to cheer, whether you want to follow one runner or watch them all go by. And here is our guide to the race.

Weather

Partly sunny, high near 56. Windy, with gusts as high as 40 miles per hour.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Saturday (All Saints’ Day).

The latest New York news

Mamdani’s strong lead: Two new polls showed Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani maintaining or expanding his lead in the New York City mayoral race as the two other major candidates strive for a late surge. A poll by Emerson College showed Mamdani, the Democratic front-runner, leading by 25 percentage points.

How Mamdani learned the ropes: Before he was elected to the State Legislature, Mamdani counseled struggling homeowners at a small nonprofit in Queens. It was his first and only full-time job outside politics.
Cuomo pushes for votes: Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running a distant second to Mamdani in most polls, has shown more hustle than he did during his languid primary campaign. What he has not done, and what former aides have long said he is incapable of doing, is change.

Other New York news

Mistakenly deported: Alejandro Juarez, who worked for more than a decade at a Trump Organization golf club, was mistakenly deported to Mexico. The way the case was handled probably violated federal immigration laws, which entitle most immigrants facing deportation to a hearing before a judge — a hearing Juarez never had.
Charged with running an open-air drug market: Prosecutors unsealed charges against 19 people who they said ran an open-air drug market in Washington Square Park, distributing fentanyl, heroin and crack cocaine.

Spooky, scary

Engineering the ultimate Halloween spectacle: How one Upper West Side neighborhood transforms into an open-air museum of Halloween art.
Can you find the Met’s 20 scariest pieces of art? These works tell a story of saints and sinners, monsters and myths.

A cutoff of food stamp aid hits New Yorkers

On Thursday the Trump administration defended its decision to stop paying for food stamps during the federal shutdown. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, is expected to use up its remaining funds by tomorrow.

In New York, where roughly three million people rely on food stamps, the cutoff could hit older people hard: More than a fifth of the food stamp recipients in the state are 60 or older. They are especially vulnerable because they may not be able to pick up another job for money to tide them over.

And they may not know what is coming. The state said that it would notify recipients about the status of November benefits online or by text messages. The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance said it would not send notifications by mail.

The cutoff prompted Gov. Kathy Hochul to declare a state of emergency. She has also promised more than $100 million in state funding for emergency food assistance for food banks and meal programs. Mayor Eric Adams said that the city would provide $15 million in emergency funding for food pantries and soup kitchens.

The money that Hochul allocated is only about 16 percent of what the state normally receives from the federal government for food aid each month, and some experts and advocates believe that food pantries are not the right place to send it. Many SNAP recipients are not accustomed to going to pantries because food stamps can be used at many grocery stores and bodegas and at some restaurants.

Roy Bolus, who is 73 and has been receiving SNAP for about a decade, said he was uneasy at the thought of going to a pantry. “I shouldn’t feel embarrassed because there are a lot of people from around the area here that go to this food pantry right around the corner,” he said. “But you know, you see them waiting on that line, and it’s so long. Now that line is going to be even longer.”

METROPOLITAN diary