Latin Americans are joining the NYC Marathon faster than the race is growing
In May, a 26-year-old from Torreón, Mexico lined up in Brooklyn with 14,000 other women and crossed the half-marathon finish line first, in 1:13:11. Fátima Alanis beat her own coach by fourteen seconds, and that coach, Roberta Groner, is 48 and was the fastest U.S. woman at the 2019 world championships marathon.
Six weeks from now, the stage gets bigger. More than 50,000 runners will start on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge out of Staten Island, cross all five boroughs, and finish in Central Park, fifty years after the race first ran that route. That field has been filling with Latin American runners faster than the race itself has grown.
Who Fills the Field
In the last 20 years, Latin American finishers grew almost three times faster than the race around them. The number of countries sending at least 100 runners went from four to eleven in the same period.
Every one of those runners paid for the privilege in their own way. Whether it was months of training, a flight, a hotel, gear, or a race entry, they all made a decision long before anyone will hand them a medal. Part of what the chart above tracks may be the sports-tourism boom reaching the region; part of it is households across Latin America committing to health and fitness.
None of that happens without someone at home getting people out the door. Brazil counted 5,241 road races in 2025 against 2,827 the year before, by the race organizers' own tally. At some point maybe, someone like Fátima in their own community inspired them to turn a November morning in New York into a line item to plan around.
Source: NYRR official race results; population, World Bank (2024). Change is 2005-2025 and overstates countries with very small 2005 bases. Honduras had no finishers in 2005. Excludes Puerto Rico, whose NYRR country coding is inconsistent across editions.
Where the Rest of Us Start
Plenty of people start running to clear their head after work. Then a friend mentions the Saturday group they run with, and a date lands on the calendar.
New York has become a hub for those groups. Latin Run Club is about two years old, founded by Colombians Camilo Ferreira and Cristina Baquerizo to bring the region's runners together, and the promise sits on the front page of its own site: it doesn't matter how fast or slow you go, how far you run, or if you're just getting started. Running, in their words, is just an excuse to hang out with friends. Its runners show up on the chart above, too.
Just as Alanis went from Torreón to the front of a New York race, Latinometrics was born in Torreón and has already lit up the Nasdaq tower in Times Square. The next stretch of that journey is a 5K through Central Park on Sunday, September 20, hosted by the Latin Run Club and New Balance, to celebrate all these runners during Hispanic Heritage Month. Come run it with us, at whatever pace you bring.
