In the city that never sleeps, these runners refuse to quit — even after midnight.
“Last place” doesn’t sound like something to celebrate. But at one iconic event, coming in last can feel like winning: the TCS New York City Marathon.
The race officially closes at 10 p.m., but its final finishers can cross the line well after dark — sometimes close to midnight.
What does it feel like to be the very last person to cross the New York Marathon finish line?
The Post spoke with four runners about their determined treks to claim the race’s final finisher medals.
When spectators shouted “Congratulations!” to Teresa Hui as she walked along the
sidewalk wearing her race bib in the 2025 marathon, she had to clarify: “There’s no medal around my neck, so I’m still in it.”
The 45-year-old actor and singer from Brighton Beach has completed 18 New York City Marathons since her 2006 debut. Over the years, the race, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year since expanding to five boroughs, became the emotional anchor of her autumn.
But chronic pain from a cascade of physical conditions eventually reshaped her journey. Today, Hui tackles the grueling 26.2-mile course with the aid of a cane, steadily bringing up the rear. Last year, she was the penultimate runner to cross the finish line.
Hui reached Central Park just before midnight, roughly 15 hours after crossing the starting line on Staten Island. The grandstands had thinned and most of the 50,000 entrants were already asleep, yet the tail end of the race held its own vibrant energy.
“All these folks are still there. They’ve got their glow sticks, and there was a walking DJ,” she said. “Your goal is never to be a final finisher… but anything can happen.”
“The marathon is in my blood. It’s in my DNA. It’s what gives me joy,” Hui told The Post.
Though not athletic as a child, she took up distance running in college, dropping her pace until she clocked a personal best of 4 hours and 34 minutes in 2011. “And I was the kid who couldn’t go down half a block,” she marveled.
Then came a sequence of debilitating diagnoses, including fibromyalgia and severe osteoarthritis, which eroded her joints and nervous system. Her brisk pace slowed dramatically to roughly 20 minutes per mile.
During her 2024 race alongside Achilles International—an organization supporting athletes with disabilities—she reached mile 10 or 11 just as crews began reopening streets to traffic. Rather than surrender to the sweep vans, Hui dug in.
“Someone who had one leg was going faster than I was,” she recalled. “I started crying because I was so inspired.”
She plans to return to the course this year, swapping her cane for forearm crutches. “I would love to finish before they turn off the official timing clocks at 10 p.m.,” she said. “But I will crawl, I will roll to that finish line — I don’t care. I’ll do anything to finish.”
New York native Danielle Grimley established three simple rules for the 2024 marathon: have fun, finish the race and don’t get hurt.
She managed two out of the three.
10 and a half hours after starting the race, Grimley ended the course dead last — and hobbling on a pair of crutches, managing a literal broken hip.
The 43-year-old human resources executive, who now lives outside Boulder, Colorado, had been a casual runner before deciding to try her first marathon. She resolved to do it in the greatest city in the world.
“It was New York or nothing for me,” Grimley told The Post.
Even when Grimley was diagnosed with a cluster of autoimmune disorders during training, she refused to abandon the dream. “I talked to a couple of doctors and they cleared me, but looking back, I think I overtrained.”
Trouble announced itself almost immediately. During the opening mile across the sweeping expanse of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, Grimley sensed her body breaking down. Her labored, awkward pace bore no resemblance to the effortless rhythm of her shakeout run the day before. A deep, persistent ache throbbed in her hip joint.
She pressed through Brooklyn and Queens, but the pain sharpened into agony. By the time Grimley reached mile 20 in the Bronx, she could no longer put any weight on her leg. She pulled into an aid tent seeking evaluation. The medical personnel on duty gently informed her that her race was effectively over.
Grimley had other plans. She asked whether they had any crutches she could borrow.
“It became a much more visceral thing. I wanted to do it to prove it to myself,” she said of the solitary, grueling six-mile march southward through the darkening roads of upper Manhattan.
“I’d been dreaming of this finish, this experience,” Grimley said. “Other people have done it with far more challenging adversity than I had in that moment. I just had a cool new way to get to the finish line. It’s just you against yourself out there.”
The morning after her finish, Grimley visited NYU Langone, where she was whisked into emergency orthopedic surgery for a hip fracture. She hasn’t run another marathon since — at least, not yet.
“Part of me looks at 2027 being the year I go back to New York.”
In 2019, Fredilyn Bangwa lined up for her fifth New York City Marathon — and experienced the heartbreak of a DNF (Did Not Finish). Dizziness overwhelmed her near mile 18, forcing her to withdraw from the course.
Unwilling to leave her goal incomplete, the 47-year-old civil engineer from Bergen County, New Jersey returned to the streets two weeks later and ran the remaining distance on her own.
After the 2020 race was cancelled due to Covid, Bangwa set her sights on 2021, determined to finish the marathon as she’d planned.
Unexpectedly, the determined runner found a running buddy along the route: a struggling marathon hopeful named Mario Diurno, who was determined to finish the race himself, but also flailing.
Seeing each other’s flagging energy, the two banded together for the long push southward.
“It took my mind off the pain — it was just having someone to talk to,” Bangwa said.
As a four-time finisher, Bangwa assumed the role of route guide, navigating them through areas like the Bronx where road barriers were already being dismantled and local traffic was beginning to encroach on the course.
As they approached Central Park, Diurno experienced a sudden rush of vitality.
“It was his first marathon, and he was so excited,” Bangwa recalled. “We had walked together for 15 miles or whatever, and then he got this second wind and ended up going way ahead of me once we entered the park.”
The gap between their finishes came down to mere seconds. “The difference between us was a matter of a minute or so, or he could easily have been the last one.”
Bangwa felt no competitive urge to chase him down. Graciously, she let her newfound partner push ahead to claim his moment. She became the last finisher with a time of 10 hours and 54 seconds.
As for Diurno, he’s no longer a total stranger.
“We still text a little here and there,” she noted. “He’s someone I would definitely love to meet up with again at some point.”
Following the tragic loss of her son Brett to suicide in 2014, Shellie Warren, a 66-year-old family therapist, discovered a devastating piece of mail in the former Navy officer’s personal inbox: an acceptance notice.
“Congratulations on qualifying for the New York Marathon,” the email read.
“He had broken records as a cross-country runner in high school — it gave him a lot of joy,” Warren recalled. “And something stuck in my heart.”
Five years later, in the autumn of 2019, Warren traveled across the country and walked onto the staging grounds in Fort Wadsworth with the words “Brett’s Mom” emblazoned across her chest in heavy duct tape.
Warren had never considered herself an athlete, but in the wake of her bereavement, she had taken up walking as a path toward emotional healing. Honoring Brett’s qualifying spot became an essential pilgrimage.
“Not finishing was not an option,” she said simply. “You do what you need to do for your kids.”
Her physical preparation had been modest: accumulating 10,000 steps a day and walking a half-marathon event in Fresno, California. “I thought I was prepared,” Warren admitted. “I’ll be very honest with you: I was not.”
Yet an unspoken spiritual obligation propelled her onward through the boroughs. “I was doing well enough in the first half that there was always someone behind me, and that gave me a little bit of hope,” she remembered.
Eventually, severe back spasms, muscle fatigue and punishing blisters slowed her progress to a crawl.
There was also the emotional toll. Brett had jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, making every bridge crossing along the marathon route an intensely emotional hurdle.
Reaching the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge early in the day proved especially poignant. “I had to pause and talk to him, say goodbye in a way I couldn’t have anywhere else,” she said. “I asked for his blessing.”
As darkness enveloped the city, Warren found herself isolated. Water stations were being dismantled, trash crews were clearing paper cups from the asphalt, and the city’s standard hum was returning.
“It started making me feel a little bit lonely. Does anybody remember I’m out here? I was afraid I was forgotten.”
She was not.
More than 12 hours after starting her trek, Warren emerged onto the brightly illuminated finish line in Central Park at approximately 11:15 p.m.
“People with physical disabilities? Ninety-year-olds? I was after all of them, but it didn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll proudly wear the last place. To me, that spoke of resilience and stubbornness and a fitting ending.”
Read the full article here
