New York City Marathon 2026: The Six Hours Before the Start

The New York City Marathon runs in five waves. A Wave 5 bus rider can spend close to four hours standing at Fort Wadsworth, the Staten Island staging ground where every runner gathers before the start. A Wave 5 runner on the last ferry waits about one hour. Runners unsure of which option to choose should check out New York Road Runners' transportation page.

More than 240,000 people applied for a 2026 lottery spot, and about 55,000 will run. You can read more about the race on 42cal's New York City Marathon page. Here's what the six hours before the start look like.

Wave gun times for 2026

NYRR's live 2026 schedule lists corral open and close times alongside each wave's gun.

The five waves run across three start colors, blue, orange and pink, each with six corrals lettered A through F. NYRR sets your wave and corral.

How NYRR assigns your wave

NYRR assigns your wave using Best Pace, your best 10K pace from any NYRR race in the last two years, converted by a published formula. If you don't have a qualifying 10K, NYRR uses the finish time you estimated when you registered. Check what a given pace works out to over other distances with 42cal's pace calculator.

Wave and corral confirmations go out in mid-October. A wave change has to be requested by September 8, 2026, and NYRR grants moves only to a later, slower wave; moving up risks disqualification and suspension. Corral changes, NYRR says, will not be considered at all.

Choosing a way to Staten Island

Starting in 2026, you choose your transportation and NYRR assigns your departure time based on your pace. The selection window runs August 25 to September 8, 2026; miss it and NYRR assigns you transportation at the Expo, with very limited options.

If you're driving, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge closes to all traffic at 7:00 a.m. Rideshare and private-bus drop-offs sit near McClean Avenue, half a mile from the villages.

NYRR enforces a Transportation Non-Compliance Policy against runners who switch modes.

How long each wave waits

NYRR hasn't published 2026's departure windows, so the table below uses last year's, along with the report-early rule and 90-minute travel estimate confirmed for 2026. Because 2026 is the first year NYRR assigns departure times by pace instead of letting you pick a slot, treat the table as what last year's runners experienced.

A Wave 5 bus rider commits 6 hours between reporting and the gun.

Why bus riders wait longer than ferry riders

Two Wave 5 runners start at the same time, and the bus rider has waited three hours longer than the runner on the last ferry, because of which box they checked on the transportation form months earlier.

A ferry rider's wait barely changes as the guns get later, because the ferry windows slide along with them. Bus departure windows barely move, an hour of slide across five waves whose guns are 2 hours 20 minutes apart, so the bus wait grows every wave.

Where the data disagrees

A commonly repeated line says corrals close 20 minutes before your wave starts. NYRR's 2026 schedule shows that's only true for Waves 2 and 3: Wave 1's corrals close 25 minutes before the gun, and Waves 4 and 5 close 15 minutes before.

Why NYRR recommends the ferry for slower runners

NYRR says it plainly: "If your expected finish time is four hours or more, we recommend you take the Staten Island Ferry. Taking the ferry will help you arrive at the start closer to your wave start time." A four-hour-plus finisher lands in Wave 4 or 5, where the bus wait is longest.

A study of 488 finishers from the 2002 Boston Marathon, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that 13 percent had hyponatremia, a low blood sodium level, with a finishing time over four hours carrying the highest odds of any risk factor it measured. That study measured drinking during the race itself, but Waves 4 and 5 are the ones standing near free Gatorade and water refill stations before the gun.

Inside Fort Wadsworth

Fort Wadsworth sits at the Staten Island foot of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, split into three villages that match the wave colors. More than 1,600 toilets are spread across the villages, medical staff work each one, and free Gatorade, coffee and bagels are available while supplies last, plus filtered-water refill stations.

NYRR doesn't publish a closing time for any village, so the corral-close times above are the closest marker for when a village empties out. It doesn't publish a walking distance from village to corral either.

It gets cold while you wait

No weather station sits at Fort Wadsworth. The best proxy is Kennedy Airport, a coastal station exposed to the same wind the fort gets. Across the last ten race mornings, the median Kennedy reading warms by about 12 degrees between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m., which is the span from the first village arrivals to the last gun. Two of those ten mornings ran 12 to 18 knots the whole way through, at a site with no shelter from the water.

Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on race morning, turning the clocks back to 1 a.m. The marathon always runs the first Sunday in November, so the two coincide every year. Sunrise at Fort Wadsworth on November 1, 2026 doesn't come until 6:26 a.m., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, so the earliest buses and ferries leave in full darkness.

Researchers in Ottawa measured men shivering at 5°C and 10°C and found that muscle glycogen, the same carbohydrate a marathon runs on, supplies most of the extra heat once shivering picks up, while blood glucose stays a minor contributor. Those experiments were colder and less clothed than a layered runner at a 45-degree start village, so treat the finding as directional. You can plan your fueling with 42cal's marathon fuel planner, which works out roughly how much carbohydrate your pace and distance will need.

Bag rules at the start

NYRR only allows the clear plastic bag you got at the Expo into Fort Wadsworth. It won't check bags for the finish, and you toss anything you're not wearing before leaving the corral, into clothing donation bins that go to All of Us Clothing.

A bag inspection and metal-detector screening aren't in NYRR's travel-time figures, so leave room for them before your corral closes.

You can bring small blankets, jackets, Mylar heat sheets, a clear tarp under 10 square feet, and bottles up to a liter. You can't bring opaque trash bags, folding or camp chairs, sleeping bags, or large blankets. So you sit on a thin tarp, or stand.

Then the corral gate closes, and after all that standing, you're finally moving toward the bridge.

Further reading

• NYRR's Start page. The live 2026 wave, corral and gun-time schedule.
• NYRR's Transportation to the Start page. Departure points, travel-time estimates and the report-early rules for each mode.
• The Boston Marathon hyponatremia study (Almond and colleagues, New England Journal of Medicine, 2005). The 488-runner blood-sodium data and its risk-factor breakdown.
• The Ottawa cold-shivering research (Haman and colleagues, Journal of Physiology, 2005). The measurements behind the muscle-glycogen finding.
• The U.S. Naval Observatory's sunrise calculator. The sunrise and civil-twilight times for Fort Wadsworth on race morning.
• The Iowa Environmental Mesonet's ASOS archive. The raw Kennedy Airport station readings behind the ten-year temperature chart.