[title]
It's official: Brooklyn will be home to a new marathon starting April 24, 2022.
The plans for the new 26.2-mile-long race were approved and made public by city representatives just yesterday, to the delight of plenty of New Yorkers.
The Brooklyn Marathon—which will be the second footrace to take place in New York each year, alongside November's famous New York City Marathon, which is the largest in the world—will tentatively begin at McCarren Park, run down the Williamsburg waterfront towards Prospect Park, Ocean Parkway and Coney Island and then loop back up again. According to preliminary talks, participants will have between six and seven hours to complete the course before streets re-open.
Check out a more detailed tentative map of the race, released by the New York Times, right here.
The exciting piece of news has been a long time coming, as advocates have been fighting to set up the race for years now but have had to contend with pushback from the organization that oversees the New York City Marathon, New York Road Runners.
According to the New York Times, "New York Road Runners has long resisted the idea of staging a spring road marathon, preferring to maintain the unique place the New York City Marathon holds in the running calendar." As a result, initial iterations of the Brooklyn Marathon—the first one having taken place back in 2011—consisted of laps around Prospect Park. The revised version of the event will clearly look and feel like a real marathon.
Speaking of the New York City Marathon: although it was cancelled for obvious reasons in 2020, it is set to happen on November 7 of this year, albeit a substantially smaller number of runners are expected to register for it.
It's time to dust off those sneakers and start training, we've spent enough time at home this year and a new marathon sounds just like the event we need to break a sweat again.