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Runners compete in the New York City Marathon in New York on November 3, 2024. | David Dee Delgado/AFP via Getty Images The 2024 New York City Marathon officially broke the world record for marathon finishers, with 55,646 runners from all over the world crossing the finish line earlier this month. It’s a far cry from the race’s humble beginnings: In 1970, just 55 runners completed the race, which then only entailed laps around Central Park.  The record-breaking participation in this month’s run came as no surprise to me, because I have seen the growing popularity of marathon running in my own life: This year, I cheered on six of my friends from the sidelines. And last year, I even ran the race myself.  In the past few years, my circle of 20- and 30-somethings has transitioned away from boozy late nights in favor of early-morning meetups at the track. Suddenly, I have strong opinions on brands of gels and shoes and run belts. I spend my weekends cheering at all sorts of races. Running culture has taken over our lives.  As it turns out, we’re part of a global trend toward marathon participation in recent decades — a phenomenon that’s been helped along further by the pandemic-era running boom. Twenty-somethings like me are a big reason for the jump: 15 percent of NYC Marathon finishers in 2019 were in their 20s. Just four years later, in 2023, they made up 19 percent, according to the Atlantic. At the Los Angeles Marathon those same years, the proportion of 20-something runners grew from 21 percent to 28 percent.  That growth prompted the Atlantic to dub running “the new quarter-life crisis.” And while “crisis” usually connotes some sort of negative spiral, my cohort’s new running obsession could be viewed less as a symptom of all that’s gone awry for our generation and more as a positive rebellion against it.   Why so many young people are taking up distance running Marathons in general are simply becoming more inclusive: Women’s participation was first allowed in the 1970s and has only recently started to achieve something like parity with men’s. There are also more finishers of color.  But for the Gen Z demographic, another key driver is just … the way life is right now.  “A lot of them started running during the pandemic. A lot of them were starting careers at that time, were graduating from college and maybe didn’t have a real graduation, maybe didn’t have these normal adult milestones,” says journalist Maggie Mertens, the author of the book Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women. “They see homeownership and marriage and kids as kind of out of reach — further out of reach than even the millennial generation did.”  That adds up to a lot of uncertainty. And what helps manage uncertainty if not a four-month, intensive training plan that calls for four to six training runs a week covering hundreds of miles, plus cross-training and stretching? Marathon season is largely over, which means it’s an ideal time to start thinking about whether you want to run one next year. Now, a disclaimer: I grew up a competitive swimmer and a softball player. The pandemic shut down all my favorite workout classes and basically forced me to lace up my running shoes. I’m not an especially fast runner, and I’m not setting out to break any world records. I mainly think of it as a great way to move my body, hang out with my friends, and challenge myself to go a little farther than I could yesterday.  If that sounds like you, read on for advice on what I learned from training as a 20-something, and things to know if you’re hoping to start training, too. Training can be a way to add structure to your life I found that preparing for the New York City Marathon functionally required the spreadsheet-ification of my life: Sunday, long run. Monday, rest. Tuesday, 4 miles. Wednesday, 8 miles. You get it. During the most strenuous, highest-mileage training weeks, I sometimes felt something like despair, but mostly the box-checking helped bring a sense of predictability, even when my work or personal life was up in the air. It also created new milestones where others — home-buying, having a kid — felt out of reach.  I visited the 2024 Chicago Marathon Expo a few weeks ago to find out more for the Today, Explained podcast, and several 20-something runners had similar experiences to share.   “You can have the worst day in the world, but the benefit of that is that you turn around and you’re like, ‘Well, at least I got my miles in,’” Taylor-Nicole Limas, 28, told me.  For some, like Mitchell Rose, 23, training is a way to impose structure on adult life. “It kind of gives me the end-of-the-semester feel, like you’re working towards something, whereas work gets very monotonous. I’m three months into my full-time job now, and I came to the realization like, ‘Oh, this just never ends.’”  Use running to push you to finally make big lifestyle changes The rigor of training mandates shedding bad habits and adopting healthy ones, too. I personally found that I had to add a fourth meal to my day — just to make up for the thousands of calories burned on my training runs. I also gave up alcohol and cut back on late nights in an effort to reduce the likelihood of feeling bad on long runs (which only sometimes worked).  Other runners told me they had to make similar commitments.  “I’m not proud of it, but I used to vape,” Pascale Geday, 26, told me at the expo. “I’m no longer vaping. I feel like it’s made me a better athlete.”  All these little adjustments add up to a much bigger change, says Kevin Masters, a professor of psychology at University of Colorado Denver and a former marathoner himself.  “You really orient your day — which turns into your weeks, which turns into months — around this event,” he told Today, Explained. “That’s kind of an orienting principle for your life.”  Training for a race can also be a way to find community The boom in marathon participation comes amid what the surgeon general is calling a loneliness epidemic, marked by decreased participation in community organizations, faith organizations, and recreational leagues over several decades.  This phenomenon is especially apparent among 20- and 30-somethings, who are becoming known as the “homebody generation.” One recent analysis found that they spend, on average, about two more hours per day at home than previous generations did.  “Where people used to gain some of their purpose and meaning in life and feel affiliated with others,” from community organizations, Masters said, those “aren’t really doing it for the younger folks as much.”  Running just might: Run-club participation is so high that it’s become a meme, and social media abounds with running influencers and content.   “I have started a group chat with a bunch of first-time marathoners,” Limas told me. “I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re all running the marathon. … We’re all women. Why not just, when we’re stressed out, text each other?’ And they’ve all become friends because of this group chat that I started.”  Of course, run clubs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Rose told me that he hadn’t had luck when he tried them out. “I have a long-term girlfriend. I don’t need to go to a run club because they’re usually looking for other things other than a good workout.”    Instead, he said, he prefers to run with just one friend: “Having someone that you can knock on the door and be like, ‘Let’s go for a run right now,’ and they’ll more often than not drop everything and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s go. Like, let’s have a great time together.’ That is another level of our friendship that I don’t think would be there otherwise.”  

In what might be President Biden's last foreign diplomacy trip, he heads to South America to meet global leaders in a region where China has begun to overshadow U.S. influence there.

Attendees cheer as Donald Trump speaks on stage during a campaign rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 2024. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images Sifting through the wreckage of the 2024 campaign, one thing that can’t be said about the Democrats is that they put too little effort into winning over Latino voters. If you looked closely, it was clear that the national party, the Biden-Harris campaign, and Democratic-allied groups were determined to avoid a repeat of 2020, when Joe Biden’s campaign was widely accused of neglecting Latino voters, starting its outreach too late, and making tone-deaf appeals — all mistakes that allowed Donald Trump to make historic gains with these communities despite Biden ultimately prevailing in the election. This time around, the Biden (and then Harris) campaign were determined to do everything right. They hired and elevated top Latino consultants, strategists, and elected officials. They opened field offices and hired staff in heavily Latino parts of swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania as early as the spring. They reached out to voters on WhatsApp, a private messaging app used as a form of social media by many Latino and immigrant communities; sent surrogates to Spanish-language radio stations; and microtargeted advertising to Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican American voters. Spanish and bilingual ads ran continuously on TV, radio, and online starting in March. And those ads moved beyond an explicit focus on identity, instead talking up policy and accomplishments like Medicare’s cap on insulin prices, the expansion of health care coverage, and job creation during the post-Covid economic recovery. The hope was that this earlier, smarter, more tailored campaign would help reverse a few trends that were obvious for most of 2023 and 2024: that Latino voters were deeply unhappy with the status quo, were not enthusiastic about Biden’s reelection, and were questioning their loyalty to the Democratic Party.  It’s clear now that this strategy was not enough. Though it will take months to get more granular data, county-level results and exit polls do indicate a rightward shift by Latino voters across the country that contributed to Trump’s victory. To be clear, it appears Democrats still won a majority of Latino voters — but the harsh reality for Democrats is that Trump once again managed to improve his standing. That doesn’t mean that Democrats should throw out the playbook for campaigning with Latino voters. Calls for a hard pivot to the right on cultural issues, or outright resignation about a permanent racial realignment — as some of the conventional wisdom floating around since the election suggests — are premature. Republicans simply cannot be sure these gains will stick around without Trump on the ballot. But there are oddly two contradictory takeaways given what we know so far: Democrats can assure themselves that they ran a pretty good campaign to win back Latino voter support. On a deeper level, however, they missed a more fundamental disconnect between the party and the voters, particularly the working class, that a textbook campaign simply couldn’t fix.  Two takeaways from the election There are two distinct points to take away from November 5.  First, campaigning does still matter. The national trend of Trump posting better margins of support in non-battleground states than in swing states applied to Latino voters as well.  Where Democrats campaigned heavily for Latino votes, Kamala Harris saw a smaller drop in support than in places where her campaign did not focus its efforts — meaning that the Harris campaign’s Latino ground game, spending, and organizing shouldn’t be discounted. The second point cuts the other way: There is a much deeper problem with Democrats’ appeal to Latino voters, one that will take time to repair. Nationally, Democrats like Biden and Harris were just not trusted as working-class champions by many Latino voters, who are still overwhelmingly working class and not college educated.  The memories of economic hardship during the pandemic (for which Trump largely escaped blame) and the inflationary period that followed never went away, and weren’t properly addressed by either Biden or Harris during the campaign. Combined with an overriding anti-incumbent mood that permeated electorates globally this year, Democrats were almost certain to do worse with Latino voters. There were some exceptions. Republican Senate candidates, for example, did not do as well as Trump did among Latino voters, and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who won the Arizona Senate race in a state Harris lost, particularly overperformed, winning by two percentage points a state that Trump won by five. But the larger point holds: Democrats lost ground with Latino voters, and analysts point to their inability to appeal to the working class as a culprit. “It starts with the credibility of the message,” Chuck Rocha, a Mexican American strategist who advised Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign and helped with both Biden general election campaigns, told me. “People like to say that Bernie Sanders was this, or that — the thing that made Bernie Sanders great was that he had always said the same thing, so he was credible. People see bullshit now in politicians. They want someone that’s credible whether they like him or hate him.” Rebuilding that credibility will be essential if Democrats are to reverse their fortunes not just with Latino voters, but with a wide swathe of the electorate.  Democrats never really figured out how to regain Latinos’ trust on the economy In retrospect, the storyline of the Latino electorate was fairly consistent. Poll after preelection poll told the same story: These voters were most concerned about the economy, and they were as likely as white voters to say they either missed the policies and economic conditions of the Trump era, or trusted Trump more than either Biden or Harris to deliver relief. At the heart of this feeling was a disconnect between what voters meant by “the economy” and what many national Democrats, including Biden and Harris, were talking about on the trail. Latino voters, troubled by inflation earlier in the Biden presidency, largely meant “prices should be lower,” while Biden and Harris mostly talked about job creation, slowing inflation, and gradually rising wages. That was true as early as November 2023, when polling from the Democratic research firm Blueprint found that Latino voters cared most about lower prices and least about “creating more jobs” — which was especially problematic because, as Blueprint also found, Latino voters more than any other racial group thought that more employment was Biden’s priority.  Add to this dynamic the fact that it was Latino and Black Americans who experienced uniquely traumatizing financial rollercoasters during the post-Covid period — seeing their wealth and financial prospects rise during the pandemic because of government aid only for rising costs of living to wipe out many of those gains before wages began to grow again — and you can see where the Biden administration’s credibility gap emerged. The Biden economic message was focused on trying to sell a positive economic success story — and there were indeed data and legislation they could point to tell that story. But according to Camille Rivera, a senior advisor for Voto Latino and founder of the Puerto Rican civic organization La Brega y Fuerza, the campaign’s foregrounding of topline indicators — the GDP, the improving consumer price index, the low unemployment rate, and investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, among others — could not sway voters who still saw vivid reminders of peak inflation in the cost of food and household essentials. “We were talking about the economy in macro forms, but people were not feeling it. They were just not feeling it. My father would be like, ‘Hey, did you see this? I just bought these potato chips. There’s like 50 percent air in these potato chips, and the price is higher,’” Rivera said. “We kept saying, ‘But the economy is great. Look at the stock market!’ That to me was many of our flaws.” The “identity force-field” showed cracks Over time, this disconnect may have taken a toll on the overall “party of the work class” brand of the national Democratic Party. And there’s perhaps no better sign of this than in polling specifically focused on one dynamic that tends to bind Latinos to the Democratic Party: the question of which party best “cares for people like you.” It’s that feeling that has tended to root most Latino voters in the Democratic camp, even if these voters don’t necessarily agree with every social position, economic or immigration policy, or cultural value that the party takes on — a kind of “identity force-field,” as Equis, a Democratic research firm focused on Latino voters, calls it.  In the aftermath of the 2022 midterms, Equis found evidence that those feelings were still fairly strong. In those midterms, there were conflicted or swing voters who turned out, and who, because of that warm association with the Democratic Party, pulled the lever for Democratic candidates. There were also Latino voters who ended up voting for Republicans —  but who still harbored warm feelings toward Democrats anyway. Generally, Equis polling found, Democrats were still the party viewed as “better for Hispanics” and which cared “about people like you.” But as Carlos Odio, an Equis co-founder, warned at the time of that report, there was a good chance swing Latino voters could drift in 2024 if “there is a major shift in the issue environment, imbalanced campaigning, or a weakening of identity bonds.” And that seems to be what happened. The signs of weakening identity bonds were there. The Biden campaign fizzled out. And the economy, as well as a rise in the salience of immigration, put national Democrats on the defensive with both Latino voters and the general electorate. By October 2024, after Biden drove down positive perceptions of the party among Latinos prior to his late-July exit, Harris had managed to recover the party’s footing. Her campaign strategy didn’t change tremendously, but polling showed Latino voters returning to the Democratic candidate, albeit not at the same rates that they had voted for Biden in 2020. By the close of the campaign, Harris was viewed as being “better for Hispanics” and “people like you.”  But the Democratic advantage had shrunk from two years before. The force field was weak. And by then, it was too late for the Harris campaign. Democrats now face a challenge: to reassess how they talk about the economy, about class, and about material conditions in a way that can connect with the electorate. There’s a tendency among some in the party — strategists, commentators, and elected officials — to either want to throw out the way they’ve run outreach to Latino voters or to deny that they have a problem at all (and blame “disinformation” or offer counterintuitive data to bolster that thinking). Democratic campaign operations in 2024 were not useless, but if the party is to have a shot in 2028, the work to rebuild credibility with working-class Latinos starts now.

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