Last but not least
Marathon finisher No. 50,624 exults in ‘win’
One New Yorker took her lateness habit to a whole new level last Sunday as she was the final timed finisher in Sunday’s New York City Marathon.
Crossing the finish line at 7:49 p.m. with a time of 8:44:21, Angela Wint, 44, strode in after 50,623 others.
“This is past fashionably late — there’s nothing fashionable about this one,” she told The Post.
The Brooklyn resident started her first marathon with some 50 members of the group Black Girls RUN! before getting separated from the pack.
Friends started to worry when her tracker stopped at mile 13. For hours, “it was just me, myself and I — and the cops on the side,” said Wint, a medical assistant for NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
Wint said there were moments when she wanted to give up during the past year or so that she was in training. But her running coach wouldn’t give up on her. “She kind of kicked my butt,” Wint said.
Still, she adds, she wasn’t prepared for just how long the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was.
“I thought I was really done,” she says about that 4-mile-plus span. “But I said, ‘I can’t stop.’ ”
She attributes her finish to her mental toughness.
“My body gave up a long time ago in that race, but my mind said ‘no.’ Everything hurt, my body was sore, and my body and mind were not working together at all. My mind said, ‘If you stop you will not finish.’ ” So she kept running. And on Tuesday, she picked up the medal engraved with her name.
Learning she came in last brought mixed emotions.
“I’m glad I’m being honored, but . . . to be honored for being last, it’s still kind of weird,” said Wint.
“I’m gonna take [the medal] and wear it, and appreciate every step I took to get to this place. Our journey isn’t for us — it’s for someone else who thinks we can’t do it.”