She ran the New York Marathon drunk. And she would do it again

26-year-old Justine Juan ran a marathon in New York drunk — and she doesn’t regret it. Huang said she likes to push herself, but drinking to the point where she can’t break any records reminded her that running can be fun, especially when it involves about seven alcoholic drinks.

“As a competitive person, I think I want to run as fast as I can,” Huang said. “But forcing myself to slow down that time — to spend time with the audience and friends who came to support me — made the experience so much better than I thought it would be.”

Huang didn’t think she would get the chance to run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon and the TCS New York Marathon three weeks apart, as both are hard to get to.

The New York Marathon lottery has acceptance rate 4% is the same as Stanford University. Huang was able to bypass the lottery and hook one of them 14,000 slots is allocated to charities that give bibs to runners who raise funds for them.

But she relied on the Chicago Marathon lottery, where more than 120,000 runners applied for 50,000 spots, according to Chicago Sun-Times. When she found out that she got the slot, she decided to run for speed there and run for the excitement in New York.

“I wanted to come out strong for Chicago because I had a goal to beat,” she said. “So that’s what I focused on.”

The Chicago and New York marathons are among the seven Abbott World Marathon Majorsas well as Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin and now Sydney, which was added earlier this month. They’re known for drawing huge crowds: Chicago has the score 1.7 million the audience is on course and New York is over 1 millionaccording to Abbott.

As Huang raced to reach her goal in Chicago, she couldn’t interact with the cheering crowd and friends who came to support her as much as she wanted. So her goal in running the New York City Marathon was to engage the cheering crowd—especially since she had several friends joining her.

“I wanted to eat all the food I saw and then drink everything the audience brought,” Huang said. “That was my plan for this race. But I didn’t expect how much food and drink there would be.”

She started with candy, then “the first guy gave me, I think, a shot of Hennessy,” Juan said. “After that, things really, really caught fire.”

Justine Huang drank about seven alcoholic drinks while running the New York City Marathon.

Soon after, three people gave her beer, and her friends, who had come to cheer her up, brought another round of alcohol. She detailed her full drunken running experience in TikTok which has garnered nearly four million views.

In total – she estimates she drank “four or five shots of alcohol and then maybe another four or five pints of beer” – along with a red glass of Solo prosecco, pictured in another TikTok with over eleven million views.

New York-based running coach Elizabeth Corkum, known in running circles as Corky, said dehydration is a serious problem during a marathon — even without alcohol.

She likes a post-race beer, but said alcohol and running don’t mix well in general.

“Alcohol is poison. It’s fun poison, but it’s poison,” Corkum said. “So for a runner, it’s going to do a couple of things. First, it is a diuretic. So depending on how much is consumed, it can really dehydrate an athlete. Alcohol can also get in the way of our body. really efficient use of carbohydrates.’

The amount of fluid needed to stay hydrated during a marathon depends on the athlete and the situation, but she said that ideally, “most marathoners should aim for about 16 ounces of fluid per hour.”

She’s also wary of athletes doing things they’ve never done before on race day because they don’t know how their bodies will react.

“A marathon is a really big challenge and a very stressful experience for our bodies mentally, physically and emotionally,” Corkum said. “So I would caution against adding anything, you know, like alcohol or weed, because that’s a pretty extreme scenario.”

If you must drink alcohol during the marathon, Corkum recommends finding drinks with a low alcohol content, such as 4%.

But Juan was intentional about hydration.

“I also stopped at every water station the marathon provided,” she said. “I drank two cups of water and two cups of Gatorade at each station. But I had to go to the bathroom at least six times during the race.”

And, she walked alone with a drink.

“It was for maybe five or six hours,” Huang said. “So I haven’t had any alcohol for about 30 minutes or something.”

And while her body isn’t used to running drunk — her body is used to running: This was her third marathon, and she said she runs between 30 and 55 miles a week.

Huang said her stomach was “surprisingly good” with all the snacks and drinks, as it was her first time consuming anything other than candy, water and electrolyte drinks in a long time.

She finished the marathon in about 5 hours, 36 minutes — down from 4:14 in Chicago a few weeks ago.

“I met so many cool people while running,” Huang said — many of them in bathroom lines.

“I literally ran the whole thing with my best friend and it was her first marathon,” she said. “Being with her and seeing our friends running around town all day looking for places to cheer us on just made me so happy. I don’t regret anything.”