Lifestyle
She ran the New York City Marathon drunk. And she'd do it again
Justine Huang has no regrets from running the 2024 New York City Marathon drunk.
MarathonFoto/Justine Huang
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MarathonFoto/Justine Huang
Justine Huang, 26, ran the New York City Marathon drunk — and she has no regrets.
Huang said she likes to push herself, but drinking to the point of being unable to break any records reminded her that running can be fun — especially when roughly seven alcoholic drinks are involved.
“As a competitive person, I have the mindset that I want to run as fast as I can,” Huang said. “But forcing myself to slow down this time — spending time with spectators and friends who came out to support me — made this experience so much better than I thought.”
Huang didn’t think she’d get the opportunity to run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon and the TCS New York City Marathon three weeks apart, since both are hard to get into.
The New York City Marathon’s lottery has an acceptance rate of 4% — the same as Stanford University. Huang was able to bypass the lottery and snag one of the 14,000 slots allocated to charities who give bibs to runners who fundraise for them.
But, she relied on the lottery for the Chicago Marathon — where over 120,000 runners applied for around 50,000 spots, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Once she learned she had received a slot, she decided to run for speed there, and run for vibes in New York City.
“I wanted to go hard for Chicago because I had a time goal to beat,” she said. “And so that was what I focused on.”
The Chicago and New York City marathons are among the seven Abbott World Marathon Majors, along with Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin and now Sydney, which was added earlier this month. They’re known for drawing huge crowds of spectators: Chicago has an estimated 1.7 million on-course spectators, and New York has over 1 million, according to Abbott.
As Huang raced to meet her time goal in Chicago, she wasn’t able to interact with the cheering crowd and friends who came to support her as much as she wanted to. So, her goal going into the New York City Marathon was to engage with the spectators cheering her on — especially since multiple friends were going to be joining her.
“I wanted to eat all the food I saw and then drink whatever the spectators were bringing,” Huang said. “That was my plan going into this race. But I didn’t expect how much food and drinks there would be.”
She started with candy, then “the first guy handed me, I think, a shot of Hennessy,” Huang said. “After that, it got really, really lit.”
Justine Huang consumed around seven alcoholic drinks while running the New York City Marathon.
MarathonFoto/Justine Huang
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MarathonFoto/Justine Huang
Shortly after, three people handed her beers, and her friends who came to cheer her on brought her another shot of liquor. She detailed her full drunk running experience in a TikTok that has amassed almost four million views.
In all — she estimates she had “four or five shots of liquor and then maybe another four or five half cups of beer” — along with a red Solo cup of prosecco shown in another TikTok with over eleven million views.
New York City running coach Elizabeth Corkum, known as Corky in running circles, said dehydration is a big concern during a marathon — even without the alcohol.
She loves a post-race beer, but said alcohol and running generally don’t mix well.
“Alcohol is poison. It’s a fun poison, but it’s poison,” Corkum said. “And so for a runner, it’s going to do a couple of things. First off, it’s a diuretic. So depending on how much is consumed, it might actually impact that athlete’s dehydration. Alcohol can also get in the way of our body’s ability to really utilize carbohydrates efficiently.”
The amount of liquid needed to stay hydrated during a marathon varies across athletes and situations — but she said ideally, “most marathoners should be trying to get in about 16 ounces of fluids per hour.”
She’s also wary of athletes doing something they’ve never done before on race day — since they don’t know how their bodies will respond.
“A marathon is a really big undertaking and a very stressful experience for our bodies mentally, physically and emotionally,” Corkum said. “So I would caution tossing in something, you know, like alcohol or weed, because it’s already a pretty extreme scenario.”
If you must consume alcohol during a marathon, Corkum recommends finding drinks with a low alcohol content, such as 4%.
But Huang was intentional about hydration.
“I also did stop at every single water station that the marathon provided,” she said. “I would chug down two cups of water and two cups of Gatorade at every station. But I did have to go to the bathroom at least six times during the race.”
And, she paced herself with the booze.
“This was like during the course of maybe five or six hours,” Huang said. “So I wasn’t pounding alcohol within the span of like 30 minutes or something.”
And even though her body wasn’t used to running drunk — her body was used to running: it was her third marathon and she said she runs 30 to 55 miles per week.
Huang said her stomach was “surprisingly fine” with all the snacks and drinks, since this was her first time consuming anything other than gummies and water and electrolyte drinks on a long run.
She finished the marathon in around 5 hours, 36 minutes — compared to 4:14 in Chicago a few weeks prior.
“I met so many cool people on the run,” 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 who spent the entire day running around the city finding spots to cheer us on, that just made me so happy. I have no regrets at all.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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