Staten Islanders Pace Thanksgiving With 76th Lou Marli Run and a Side of Food Drive

An annual Thanksgiving road race on Staten Island reveals how local traditions can quietly strengthen communal ties and public health alike.

On a bracing November morning, while most New Yorkers contemplated the logistics of turkey and traffic, hundreds of Staten Islanders laced up at Midland Beach for their borough’s longest-running athletic ritual. The Lou Marli Run, now in its 76th year, drew old hands and new faces alike—athletes eager for competition, families keen on togetherness, all united by an unlikely Thanksgiving custom: dashing before dining. As ever, the true currency of entry was neither dollars nor medals, but canned food for the borough’s needier households.

The scene was archetypal New York: wind-whipped runners jostling on Shore Front Parkway, parents coaxing jostling toddlers to the start line of the 50-meter Turkey Tot Trot, volunteers stacking food donations beside folding tables groaning with carbs and bananas. Race director Steve Zimmermann, a fixture of Staten Island distance circles, called it “a big family reunion where a couple of races happen to break out.” The Lou Marli Run, organized by the Brighton Kiwanis Club—far from being a mere footrace—is in effect the borough’s unofficial Thanksgiving invocation.

More than just a race, the event features a slate for all ages: a 400-meter child dash for ages 7–10, an 800-meter for tweens, and a mile for the more serious teens—plus the starriest contest, the 5K for adults, veterans, and local running luminaries. This year, Olivia Jaenicke—fresh from a sterling finish at the 2025 NYC Marathon—took the women’s title in just over 19 minutes, while borough stalwart Michael Cassidy breezed through the men’s masters’ field in a brisk 16:25. “It’s just a tradition I love,” Cassidy quipped. “I’ve been doing it for about 25 years now.”

The effect is more than festive. The Lou Marli Run provides an annual pulse check for Staten Island’s running scene—an arena less feted than Manhattan’s, but every bit as fervent. By waiving an entry fee and encouraging donations to local food pantries, the organizers harness the calories burned for tangible social relief. Over 70 years, a paltry number of local Thanksgiving observances compare in continuity or impact.

Though medals are awarded, the real prize is inclusiveness. Organizers deliberately emphasise participation over podiums, with special effort to entice youngsters. “The focus is on getting kids involved,” Zimmermann said, reflecting a belief, increasingly echoed by public-health officials, that tackling childhood inactivity may prove as urgent as any urban challenge. The event’s informality—rarified in a city of ever-costlier races—means no one is priced out.

Such gatherings inoculate against the atomisation that has beset so many urban spaces, especially in the aftermath of pandemic isolation. Staten Island, often caricatured as New York’s sleepy, insular appendix, here reveals its unusual strengths: Old World neighbourliness, robust volunteerism, and an athletic tradition that predates the borough’s annexation by the metropolis. The very lack of spectacle is itself instructive—a counterpoint to the city’s marathonian pageantry, casting the pleasures of small-scale tradition in sharp relief.

The economic consequences, if puny in dollar terms, are quietly meaningful. Each year, a modest but measurable inventory of pantry staples is collected for local charities, and a diffuse but durable sense of reciprocity is reinforced. While Citi Field or Central Park’s racing calendar may generate buff economic multipliers, Midland Beach’s race cultivates a kind of social capital that rarely makes budget lines but often sustains communities through crisis.

Tradition as public utility

Beyond borough borders, Staten Island’s Thanksgiving ritual finds echoes in hundreds of “turkey trots” across America. According to the Road Runners Club of America, over one million participants stampeded Thanksgiving morning races nationwide this year, making the holiday second only to July 4th for road-racing turnout. Yet few events approach the age—or unbroken constancy—of the Lou Marli Run. Amid a city known for disposable traditions and high-turnover populations, such persistence merits note.

In a time when public trust in institutions seems increasingly tepid, the durability of grassroots initiatives like Staten Island’s race offers a useful civic corrective. While many American traditions skew towards consumption—Black Friday’s retail gluttony being the most obvious—community footraces quietly valorise public health, intergenerational socialising, and mutual aid, typically for the price of a few tins of beans. That such an event flourishes in New York’s least-glamorous borough may portend well for the city’s civic metabolism.

The wry lesson is this: community can be fostered in interstitial spaces and unshowy traditions. Athletic events of this vintage operate as low-tech public infrastructure—a phenomenon as relevant to city planners as to epidemiologists. Policymakers keen to boost neighbourhood health might do better to dispense fewer pronouncements and more small grants to local organisers—those already adept at corralling runners and cans of soup alike.

In Europe, local running events have been marshalled as a bulwark against both obesity and loneliness, often at lower cost than medical interventions. New York might take a leaf from its own playbook, having long been a city of strong neighbourhood associations before it became a playground for the global investor class. Staten Island’s ritual proves, in miniature, that low-barrier, non-commercial events can build both cardiovascular and social strength.

Of course, it would be a mistake to treat the Lou Marli Run as a panacea. Its direct reach is limited; the borough’s health outcomes remain middling by city standards, and persistent inequities in access to sporting infrastructure stubbornly persist. Yet, as a model for bottom-up civic engagement—with benefits both metabolic and metaphysical—it is no small feat.

More than seven decades on, Staten Island’s Thanksgiving runners quietly affirm that community is made not only by grand gestures, but by ritual, repetition, and muddy sneakers. In an era when so much of urban life seems engineered for individualism, the Lou Marli Run offers a modest, enduring counterargument. ■