The New York City Marathon is a great civic event, and it is also a market for a scarce good: the right to run 26.2 miles through five boroughs on a Sunday in November, with nearly 60,000 other people. One way to get that right is to raise money for charity. Back on My Feet, a running nonprofit that is an official charity partner of the race, asks its fundraising runners to commit to $4,000, and says the money pays for work materials, tuition, transit passes and sometimes the first month’s rent on a new apartment.
Every so often the money goes the other way and the charity buys the bib for one of its own members. This year one of those members is Tim Blackmore, who, as Eryn Mathewson reported for CNN, has spent the past year living in a shelter on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He is 42, a US Marine Corps veteran, and this is his first marathon. He is hoping to break three hours, which only a small share of marathoners ever manage. “I’m a strong runner and want the challenge,” he wrote in a text.
How he ended up in a shelter is a sad story, and he tells it plainly. His mother died in 2023, and after that he turned to alcohol and cocaine. “Basically, I walked away from my job in Long Island. I walked away from my apartment, and I just didn’t really have anything left,” he said. “I burnt through everything and I just needed to start over.” He joined a recovery program and kept relapsing. Eventually he went through detox, and in 2025 he moved into a shelter that supports people in recovery. That is where he found Back on My Feet, which partners with shelters to work with people experiencing homelessness.
“If it wasn’t for running,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t be sober.”
The organization’s model is worth spelling out, because the running comes first and is not really the end goal. By its own description, Back on My Feet operates in 16 cities, recruits members at shelters and rehab facilities, and starts them running two to three days a week. Members who stick with it move on to help with education, job training, job referrals and housing. The group says it has served more than 15,000 people experiencing or at risk of homelessness since 2007. You could describe this as a commitment device. Showing up at dawn to run with a group is an early, hard, checkable promise, and keeping it is evidence that you can keep the next one. Blackmore describes it in roughly those terms: “I’m a better employee, I’m more dependable, and it’s like running — I’m accountable to myself.”
At first he ran nearly every day. Within months he had finished a half marathon. Now he works as a union laborer in construction and runs about three times a week, both for marathon training and to keep his mental health steady. He talked his twin brother, Daniel, into training with him, and Daniel now volunteers with the group. Back on My Feet sponsored Blackmore’s entry because it considers him one of its strongest and most dedicated members. CNN counts nine other runners affiliated with the group in Sunday’s race, four of them currently homeless and the rest alumni who have found housing and jobs. A PIX11 profile of another member puts the group’s total at nine runners rather than ten.
Amy J. Kemter, a therapist and social worker in San Antonio, coauthored a 2022 study of a pilot running program for people experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. She has a nice point about what a road race does to status: “If you show up to a race and you are unhoused and you’re in a T-shirt and a dirty pair of running shoes, you literally look like everybody else. So it erases all the stigma that kind of goes with that, too.” Few public places have a stricter uniform code, and almost nobody cares who is wearing it.
The couch
Dwayne Ferguson, 22, is training in Brooklyn and has a simpler goal than Blackmore: finishing. He is the first of his friends to try the distance, and they tease him about it. “They say ‘good luck’ and they say, ‘damn!’” he said, laughing. “What sane type of person would do that to themselves?”
Ferguson does not live in a shelter, and he went out of his way not to. A few months ago a disagreement with his mother left him without a home of his own, and since then he has stayed with his girlfriend’s family. He says he is grateful to them, but the house is full, he sleeps on the couch, and tensions with one family member have sometimes made things uncomfortable. He is interning with a program that feeds children and families in need, and he is saving up to rent a room.
His bib came together through a chain of favors. He was in Next PAGE, a trauma-informed creative writing program for young people in detention and reentry, and he wrote about loving to run and wanting to meet male role models. The program’s founder, Emily Palmer, encouraged him to enter the marathon and put him in touch with a running group, Harlem Run. Jesse Liriano, one of the group’s leaders, paid for his registration, and the group helped him find a shoe sponsor. It took an essay, a founder, a club leader and a shoe company to get one young man onto a start line in Staten Island.
Training has been patchy. He has had to fit runs around work and school while also worrying about whether he can afford food. Blackmore has found community in group runs. Ferguson often likes to run alone, especially in the morning. “It takes a lot of stress off my shoulders, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve been able to sleep a little bit better, think a lot better. It’s just been peaceful running, feeling the wind.”
Jo Dawes, a physiotherapist and principal research fellow in primary care and population health at University College London, coauthored a 2024 systematic review of physical activity interventions for adults experiencing homelessness. It was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. It found that exercise can support health and well-being, build social connections and give people a sense of achievement. The authors were careful to add that most of the evidence was qualitative and might not carry over beyond high-income countries. The review used a broad definition of homelessness that counts people living in insecure housing alongside people sleeping rough or in shelters. That definition covers Ferguson, who has a roof over his head but no lease. Dawes says it is a mistake to think exercise matters less to people without homes: “Whether we have a home or not, we’re all humans, we all have our needs, we all need to be well.”
Both men say they will keep running after the finish line in Central Park. Blackmore is due to move into his own apartment in December, and he is already thinking about an ultramarathon, which can get very long indeed. Ferguson recently earned his GED and hopes to go to college. “I like to inspire people to do more, not only for others, but for themselves,” he said. “So running, I would like for them to see that as, ‘Oh, he’s running. Maybe I could, you know, do something that I like to do.’”
A marathon entry, it turns out, is a pretty cheap thing to give someone. The costly part is everything the runner has to change to reach the start, and nobody can pay for that on their behalf.