Halloween. The Marathon. Daylight Saving. What a Weekend.

Good morning. It’s Friday, the beginning of a marathon weekend. I used a small “m” there because more than the New York City Marathon is on the calendar. We’ll also look at Bruce Blakeman’s candidacy for governor against the incumbent, Kathy Hochul.

The city’s transportation commissioner, Mike Flynn, called it “the epic journey.”

Today is the Friday before the New York City Marathon. You might think that he was talking about running 26.2 miles through the five boroughs, as nearly 60,000 runners will do on Sunday.

He wasn’t.

He was talking about the blue line that marks the route and the journey to paint it. Most of the line was spray-painted this week by crews from his agency who ran through 55 gallons of that familiar light blue. “Regular latex paint like you would use in your home,” said Mike Fratianni, the deputy chief of operations at the Transportation Department’s Maspeth Central Shop. But at home, you don’t have the precision nozzles used to lay down the line late at night, when traffic is relatively sparse.

Their handiwork will wash away before long, unlike, say, solid yellow lines in the middle of a street. Those are made of plastic, heated to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and bond with the asphalt, Fratianni said.

New York Road Runners, which manages the race, measures it carefully. My colleague Luis Ferré-Sadurní trailed the chief measurer, who has never run a New York City Marathon, not even when he was checking that the course was the required 26.2 miles. He rode a bicycle, often against traffic.

The first race, and the marathons from 1971 to 1975, were run entirely in Central Park. Only 55 runners finished the first one. In 1976 — when the city was reeling after edging to near-bankruptcy — it became a five-borough event. At the time, the expansion was seen as a one-time thing, commemorating America’s bicentennial. Here is how it evolved.

What do you hear if you’re watching the runners? There’s the sound of their feet on the pavement, of course, but then there’s the cowbell. Here is how that relatively pedestrian instrument became the signature sound of most major marathons.

Early voting ends on Sunday

Through Wednesday, Day 5 of early voting, 357,027 people had checked in to cast ballots, the city’s Board of Elections said. That was about 15,000 fewer than after five days of early voting last year, when Zohran Mamdani was on the ballot in a closely watched race and his campaign was focused on getting newly registered voters to their polling places.

This year Mamdani voted early, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the early-voting polling place for Gracie Mansion. His ballot was one of 99,121 cast in Manhattan through Wednesday. Brooklyn led the borough-by-borough breakdown, with 105,516 ballots.

So does daylight saving time

Officially, anyway, Halloween — and the NYC Village Halloween Parade — will be over by the time daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday. “We’ve been calling it the witching hour,” said Jeanne Fleming, the artistic and producing director of the parade. It parade begins at 7 p.m. at Canal Street and the Avenue of the Americas.

The end of daylight saving time means that the evening commute will be darker next week, and that means more early-evening crashes. “As our days grow shorter and turn darker, the conditions on our roads can get more dangerous,” said Olufunmilola Obe, the Police Department’s chief of transportation.

The reminders will be hard to miss. The city’s Transportation Department is running a “Dusk and Darkness” campaign with posts on Instagram, Facebook and X and messages on LinkNYC kiosks.

So far, there have been 76 pedestrian deaths on the streets and roads in 2026, fewer than in any of the last five years. There were 74 at this point in the pandemic year of 2020.

Hoping to keep the numbers down, the police have assigned officers on the evening shift to enforce driving violations — speeding, disobeying traffic lights, failing to yield to pedestrians and “driving distracted.” At the same time, traffic enforcement agents will pay special attention to double-parked cars and trucks that are blocking bike and bus lanes.

How unsafe is the 5 o’clock hour? A New Jersey law firm analyzed 10 years of crash data from New York City and found that in the two weeks after the clocks fell back, nearly twice as many pedestrians were injured in crashes as in the two weeks before. “Before the switch, the 5 p.m. hour looks like an ordinary part of the evening rush,” the firm’s analysis said. “After it, no hour of the day has more recorded pedestrian injuries.”

But that’s not the only way that the law firm — which handles injury cases — tracks the time change. “We see an uptick in people calling us, saying, ‘I was involved in a pedestrian-versus-car accident,’” said James Lynch, a founding partner in the firm. “Drivers aren’t used to seeing pedestrians in the dark.”

Weather

Today will be sunny with a high near 70. Mostly clear skies are expected tonight, with a low around 48.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (All Saints’ Day).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Hundreds of students, staff, faculty and alumni approached the sponsors of this resolution to emphasize to us that the Jane Doe case is but a tip of the iceberg.” — Paul Ortiz, the lead faculty sponsor of a no-confidence measure condemning the way Cornell University’s administration has handled campus sexual assault.

The latest Metro news

‘Lambscapers’ retire: Since 2013, the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral has hosted sheep in its north graveyard in the fall. Now, with the church planning to renovate, the sheep will no longer have room to safely graze.

Charged with hate crimes in two stabbings: Federal prosecutors say that Anna Mochalova walked up to Jewish men in Midtown Manhattan last week and stabbed them with a sharp, needlelike object. “A hate crime is a message written in violence, and this defendant’s message was loud and clear,” the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said.

Seeking a third term: If Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, a Democrat, wins a third term, he would become the state’s longest-serving governor. His Republican opponent, Ryan Fazio, who at 36 is a bit more than half Lamont’s age, is trying to become the first candidate to unseat a governor in Connecticut in decades.

What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up,” Jeffery C. Mays talks with Sam Levine, the city’s commissioner of Consumer and Worker Protection, about how a proposed crackdown on A.I.-powered customer-service “labyrinths” would make it easier to get through to a real person. The program airs on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

The Republican who says he can save New York

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for governor, is friends with President Trump and against the policies of “Zohran Man-dami,” whose name he almost always mispronounces, and Gov. Kathy Hochul.

He presents himself as the antidote to the runaway New York mayhem that he says has accelerated on her watch. “It’s a death spiral right now,” he said last week. “We need to pull out of it. I’m the pilot.”

But he has consistently trailed Hochul in public opinion surveys, which he derides as “woke university polls.”

My colleagues Matt Flegenheimer and Benjamin Oreskes write that Blakeman has hammered Hochul on affordability at a time when many in the state are, in fact, lukewarm about her. And Blakeman has continued to make crime a central talking point at a time when surveys suggest that crime is no longer a top concern among voters.

Recognizing that Republicans alone cannot elect Blakeman in a heavily Democratic state, allies have hoped that getting him in front of disillusioned Democrats and independents might help. But at this late stage, some voters do not seem to know exactly who Blakeman is or what he stands for. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that nearly a quarter of voters had not heard enough to form an opinion about Blakeman. (The same poll gave Hochul a 14-point edge.)

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