With 14 hours until the starting gun, Casey Neistat laid out his race gear on the floor of his apartment, dressed in a skeleton costume, and stared at everything he had spent a year preparing for. The New York City Marathon is not just a race to him. It is, as he put it himself, ‘my Super Bowl, my Christmas, my birthday. It’s my favorite day of the year.’ That admission carries real weight from someone who has run the thing enough times to know his worst year and his best year both felt exactly the same on the morning after.
The week leading into race day was, by his own admission, a slow unraveling. Neistat does not taper gracefully. While experienced marathoners use the final week to rest, he spends it cataloguing every possible injury that could end his race before it begins: rolling an ankle stepping off a curb, blowing an Achilles picking up his boosted board, getting hit by a bus, falling off a ferry. ‘It’s irrational,’ he acknowledged, and then kept listing disasters anyway.
A year of work and a week of controlled panic
On day four before the race, Neistat was on a work shoot alongside a photographer named Olaf, who was also running the marathon. Neistat asked him what his own prep week had been like. ‘Most terrible week of prep I’ve ever had in my entire life,’ Olaf said, laughing. Neistat asked how much of that was his fault. ‘Pretty much all of it,’ Olaf said.
Carbo loading, handled with similar intensity, consisted of three everything bagels in a bag. That was it. That was the plan.
Two days out, he made his way to the Jacob Javits Center for the marathon expo to collect his bib, a moment he called one of his favorites of the entire week. He ran into Roberto, a longtime presence in his marathon circle, and made one last plea for him to run. Roberto declined with warmth, reminding Neistat he had already earned his ‘PhD from the Marathon School of Running’ and did not need the company.
The numbers he was carrying into Central Park
With his bib in hand, Neistat walked through his honest time expectations for the race. His fastest marathon ever was a 2-hour 57-minute run in New York City in 2025. His slowest was his first, a 4-hour 12-minute finish in 2009. For this race, he put the probability of breaking three hours again at roughly 20 percent, a result he labeled ‘superb.’ He gave himself about a 50 percent chance of finishing between 3 hours and 3:05, which he called ‘a good job.’ Anything slower than 3:15 he assigned a 10 percent likelihood and described as ‘catastrophically wrong.’
He was candid about why those odds were what they were. ‘I wish I was as fit as I was last year,’ he said. ‘I just know I’m not. I didn’t do the work.’
The forecast added another layer of uncertainty. A meteorologist he worked with that week showed a chart mapping race-day high temperatures from 2000 to 2025 against median finish times across the field, with a clear pattern: warmer days produce slower times. The models were pointing toward a high of 67 to 69 degrees. Neistat noted, without needing to add much, that 2022, the hottest year in that dataset, was also the year he ran his slowest marathon ever.
The skeleton at the starting line
The three everything bagels, laid out on a counter somewhere in Manhattan on October 31st, 2026.
Halloween came and went, the costume came off, and sometime before sunrise on November 1st, one of 50,000 runners would take the Staten Island ferry toward the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Neistat posted this account before he knew how the race ended. ‘When I’m uploading this,’ he wrote, ‘I have no idea what happens in the marathon.’ That is the part of the story he had been building toward all week, and the only part left entirely to the course.
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