TLDR;

• The TCS New York City Marathon is the jewel in the crown of the marathon majors and the world’s most popular big-city marathon event attracting, this year, more than 50,000 participants and 2 million or so spectators.
• Among participants, the proportion of men and women is roughly 60:40 and continues to equalise as more and more women are seen to participate year on year. This year a majority of runners were over 40 years of age; the average age of participants was just shy of 41 years old.
• Pacing continues to be a challenge for most runners — even the elites tended to positive-split and the final hills posed a singular challenge for all of the runners— but women ran a more evenly paced race than men.
• Hitting the wall was less of a problem in New York than some big city marathons such as Chicago, but it continued to plague slower runners and most especially men and younger runners.
• Fast-starts were commonplace in New York, as they are in other marathons, and, as is also the case in other marathons, when non-elites go out too fast they tend to suffer from slower finish-times and are liable to bonk later. Fast-starts can be beneficial for elites though; I guess they know…