Rajasekar Nonburaj (𝑅𝒥)

The scariest guy on the start line of the New York City Marathon on Sunday had never run a marathon. He'd never even run 26.2 miles in practice. And he picked New York a full year ago for a reason that sounds completely backwards. It's one of the slowest courses in the sport. He's Andreas Almgren, the Swede who won the world half marathon title in September, and slow was the whole plan. Most of the big marathons like London, Berlin, Chicago and Tokyo pay pacemakers to drag the leaders through world record splits for most of the race. Those races basically turn into time trials. Whoever can hold the pace the longest wins, and that's usually a guy with 2:02 on his resume. New York got rid of pacemakers in 2007. Then it throws five bridges at you. The Verrazzano climbs over 150 feet in the very first mile, and Fifth Avenue gains about another 100 between miles 22 and 23, right when your legs are toast. So nobody runs fast there. The last two winners ran 2:07 and 2:08. The world record is 1:59:30, and New York's course record is 2:04:58. Almgren built his entire debut inside those five and a half minutes. When nobody's chasing a clock, the pack stays bunched up for 20-plus miles and the whole thing comes down to who still has a sprint left in Central Park. Benson Kipruto won it last year by a hair at the line. Almgren started out as an 800 meter runner. He ran 1:45.59 back in 2015, which is the kind of finishing speed marathoners almost never carry. He told Swedish TV in August his plan was to sit with the leaders and sprint for the win, and that he'd worry about a fast time on a flat course next year. Honestly, it's a miracle he made it to a start line at all. He played soccer for AIK in Stockholm until he was 18 and quit because he kept getting hurt. Running wasn't much kinder to him. He lost about four years to stress fractures, including a broken bone in his foot and a fractured sacrum in 2019, and in 2024 a shin injury knocked him out of the Paris Olympics the day before his 5,000 meter heat. That sacrum injury ended up shaping how he trains. While he was rehabbing he copied the Norwegian double threshold method from another Swedish runner, Kalle Berglund, where you do two controlled hard sessions in the same day. He still does it every Tuesday and Thursday, and he writes most of his own plan. For this build he ran over 2,000 km in ten weeks with three runs out to 40K. He also spent months training his stomach to handle around 120 grams of carbs an hour, because you can't sprint in Central Park on an empty tank. He was honest about the part he couldn't train for. He said he'd learned how to suffer for about an hour, and two hours felt like walking into a new world. When it gets bad, he tells himself "don't be a crybaby." Going into Sunday, no European-born man had won New York since Giacomo Leone in 1996. The guy on his shoulder in this clip is Yeman Crippa, who won the Paris Marathon this year and picked New York because the hills reminded him of Paris. What you're watching is the last four minutes of a race Almgren started planning last November.