New York City Half Marathon

The organiser’s tour of the 2026 course opens in Brooklyn: the race “starts on Washington Avenue”, and runners pass the Brooklyn Museum on the way through security to the pre-start. Prospect Park “will challenge you … with a run up historic Battle Pass Hill”. The course then “exits Prospect Park and loops around Grand Army Plaza”, the Brooklyn one with the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, and heads down Flatbush Avenue past the arena. At the bottom it turns left onto Tillary Street and right onto Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard.

This is the 2026 course.

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The organiser says the race crosses the East River “via the bridge’s Manhattan-bound roadway” and takes “the exit ramp to the right off the bridge to join the FDR Drive”. Runners then use the northbound lanes of the FDR Drive, “closed to traffic on race morning”, for about 4 miles. The United Nations stands just north of the turn onto East 42nd Street, and the course goes on past the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library before turning from West 42nd Street onto Seventh Avenue and through Times Square, “one of two times a year the Crossroads of the World is closed to traffic”.

Past Carnegie Hall on Seventh Avenue at West 57th Street the course turns right onto Central Park South, then left at Grand Army Plaza (the Manhattan one) into the park, crosses the 72nd Street Transverse and finishes on West Drive. The organiser calls it the only race in history to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is the 2026 course.

Sourced

The organiser’s 2026 checkpoints, all of them “no later than” times: the Brooklyn Bridge at the 4.1-mile mark by 10:20 a.m., the bridge’s off-ramp to the FDR Drive at the 5.4-mile mark by 10:40 a.m., the exit from the FDR Drive to 42nd Street at the 9.4-mile mark by 11:45 a.m., and the finish line in Central Park at the 13.1-mile mark by 1:30 p.m. The finish line closed “approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes after the final participant crosses the start line”, which “allows the bridge and road re-openings to start”.

On the FDR Drive the organiser sweeps on a rolling basis at about a 20:00 minute-per-mile pace from the start line, beginning at 9:15 a.m. Runners reached by the sweep ride a bus to the finish, or get out at 42nd Street and First Avenue and walk the rest on the sidewalk. A runner who finishes that way is counted as a post-race participant and still appears in the official finisher results.

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