Teresa Hui has vowed to “crawl” or “roll” across the New York City Marathon finish line this year if that is what finishing demands.
Hui, 45, an actor and singer from Brighton Beach, has completed 18 New York City Marathons since her 2006 debut, and the race has become the emotional anchor of her autumn. Chronic pain from fibromyalgia and severe osteoarthritis has slowed her pace to roughly 20 minutes per mile, forcing her to tackle the 26.2-mile course with a cane and steadily bring up the rear. Last year, she was the penultimate runner to cross the finish line, reaching Central Park just before midnight after roughly 15 hours on the course.
“I will crawl, I will roll to that finish line — I don’t care. I’ll do anything to finish,” she told The Post. She plans to swap her cane for forearm crutches this year and hopes to finish before the official timing clocks shut down at 10 p.m.
Her relationship with the marathon began in college, when she took up distance running despite being “the kid who couldn’t go down half a block,” as she marveled. She eventually clocked a personal best of 4 hours and 34 minutes in 2011. Then came the cascade of diagnoses that eroded her joints and nervous system. During her 2024 race alongside Achilles International, which supports athletes with disabilities, she reached mile 10 or 11 just as crews began reopening streets to traffic.
“Someone who had one leg was going faster than I was,” she recalled. “I started crying because I was so inspired.”
The grandstands had thinned and most of the 50,000 entrants were already asleep when she finally approached the finish, yet she found the tail end of the race held its own vibrant energy. “All these folks are still there. They’ve got their glow sticks, and there was a walking DJ,” she said. “Your goal is never to be a final finisher… but anything can happen.”
Danielle Grimley, 43, established three simple rules for her 2024 marathon: have fun, finish the race and don’t get hurt. She broke all of them, ending the course dead last and hobbling on borrowed crutches with a literal broken hip. The human resources executive, now living outside Boulder, Colorado, had been a casual runner before deciding to attempt her first marathon in what she considered “the greatest city in the world.”
“It was New York or nothing for me,” Grimley told The Post.
Even after being diagnosed with a cluster of autoimmune disorders during training, she refused to abandon the dream. Trouble announced itself almost immediately on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, where her labored, awkward pace bore no resemblance to her shakeout run the day before. By mile 20 in the Bronx, she could no longer put any weight on her leg. Medical personnel gently informed her that her race was effectively over.
Grimley had other plans. She asked whether they had any crutches she could borrow.
“It became a much more visceral thing. I wanted to do it to prove it to myself,” she said of the solitary, grueling six-mile march southward through the darkening roads of upper Manhattan. “I’d been dreaming of this finish, this experience. Other people have done it with far more challenging adversity than I had in that moment. I just had a cool new way to get to the finish line. It’s just you against yourself out there.”
The morning after her finish, she visited NYU Langone and was whisked into emergency orthopedic surgery for a hip fracture. She hasn’t run another marathon since — at least, not yet. “Part of me looks at 2027 being the year I go back to New York.”
Fredilyn Bangwa, 47, a civil engineer from Bergen County, New Jersey, knows the pain of not finishing. In 2019, dizziness overwhelmed her near mile 18 of her fifth New York City Marathon, forcing a DNF. Unwilling to leave her goal incomplete, she returned to the streets two weeks later and ran the remaining distance on her own. After the 2020 race was cancelled due to Covid, she set her sights on 2021.
Unexpectedly, she found a struggling marathon hopeful named Mario Diurno along the route. Seeing each other’s flagging energy, the two banded together for the long push southward.
“It took my mind off the pain — it was just having someone to talk to,” Bangwa said. As a four-time finisher, she assumed the role of route guide, navigating them through areas like the Bronx where road barriers were already being dismantled and local traffic was beginning to encroach on the course.
As they approached Central Park, Diurno experienced a sudden rush of vitality. “It was his first marathon, and he was so excited,” Bangwa recalled. “We had walked together for 15 miles or whatever, and then he got this second wind and ended up going way ahead of me once we entered the park.”
The gap between their finishes came down to mere seconds. “The difference between us was a matter of a minute or so, or he could easily have been the last one.” Bangwa felt no competitive urge to chase him down, graciously letting her newfound partner push ahead to claim his moment. She became the last finisher with a time of 10 hours and 54 seconds.
“We still text a little here and there,” she noted. “He’s someone I would definitely love to meet up with again at some point.”
Shellie Warren, 66, a family therapist, discovered a devastating piece of mail in her son Brett’s inbox after his 2014 death by suicide: a New York Marathon acceptance notice. The former Navy officer had broken records as a cross-country runner in high school, and the email gave him joy. “And something stuck in my heart,” Warren recalled.
Five years later, she walked onto the staging grounds in Fort Wadsworth with “Brett’s Mom” emblazoned across her chest in heavy duct tape. She had never considered herself an athlete, but had taken up walking as a path toward emotional healing. Her physical preparation was modest: accumulating 10,000 steps a day and walking a half-marathon in Fresno, California. “I thought I was prepared,” Warren admitted. “I’ll be very honest with you: I was not.”
“Not finishing was not an option,” she said simply. “You do what you need to do for your kids.”
Brett had jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, making every bridge crossing along the marathon route an intensely emotional hurdle. Reaching the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge early in the day proved especially poignant. “I had to pause and talk to him, say goodbye in a way I couldn’t have anywhere else,” she said. “I asked for his blessing.”
As darkness enveloped the city, Warren found herself isolated. Water stations were being dismantled, trash crews were clearing paper cups from the asphalt, and the city’s standard hum was returning. “It started making me feel a little bit lonely. Does anybody remember I’m out here? I was afraid I was forgotten.”
More than 12 hours after starting her trek, she emerged onto the brightly illuminated finish line in Central Park at approximately 11:15 p.m.
“People with physical disabilities? Ninety-year-olds? I was after all of them, but it didn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll proudly wear the last place. To me, that spoke of resilience and stubbornness and a fitting ending.”
The race officially closes at 10 p.m., but its final finishers can cross the line well after dark — sometimes close to midnight — and the 2025 event marks the 50th anniversary since the marathon expanded to five boroughs.
“The marathon is in my blood. It’s in my DNA. It’s what gives me joy,” Hui told The Post.
When spectators shouted “Congratulations!” to her as she walked along the sidewalk wearing her race bib in the 2025 marathon, she had to clarify: “There’s no medal around my neck, so I’m still in it.”