John Mazzei, a 57-year-old ballroom-dance instructor from Lindenhurst, New York, has completed six marathons without shoes or socks, drawing stares from cops, cheers from strangers, and a good-luck autograph on his foot from a champion runner.
Mazzei didn't start running until he was about 43. Within three months, conventional sneakers had wrecked his knees badly enough to sideline him. He quit, and stayed away for years, until he picked up Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, a book that examines the sports science behind shoeless running. That changed everything. Mazzei ditched the sneakers for good, started conditioning his bare feet on the streets of his Long Island neighborhood, and worked his way up from short distances to a 5K and beyond.
His first New York City Marathon, run barefoot in the early 2010s to honor his uncle Thomas Stone after an ALS diagnosis, came in at 3 hours and 48 minutes. He has now run the NYC Marathon four times without shoes, plus the Long Island Marathon and an impromptu race in Goshen, a small town in upstate New York, six barefoot marathons in all, the New York Post reported.
Training barefoot on Long Island streets draws attention, not all of it friendly. Mazzei said a police officer once stopped him during a training run, apparently suspicious of a man sprinting down the road with no shoes.
"I actually one time got pulled over by a police officer while I was running barefoot training for the marathon. I guess they thought I robbed somebody, but I said, 'Actually, I was doing an 8-minute mile.'"
Passersby shout the obvious. "Hey! You forgot your shoes!" is the standard line. Mazzei's go-to reply: "I just forgot to tie them and ran right out of them."
Not every encounter is skeptical. During one NYC Marathon, a fan leaning off a fire escape yelled "Barefoot John!", proof that at least some spectators along the 26.2-mile route had started to recognize him. And at a pre-race expo, 2009 New York City Marathon winner Meb Keflezighi signed Mazzei's foot and wrote two words: "Run to win."
Running 26.2 miles on bare skin is not painless. Mazzei has dealt with glass shards, blood blisters, and some of the roughest pavement New York City has to offer. He called Queens "the gnarliest" stretch of the marathon route because of its jaggedly filled potholes. One hot day on a track, location and year unspecified, he developed blood blisters on the balls of his feet severe enough to keep him off the road for about a month.
He handles the small hazards with deadpan practicality.
"I do get, periodically, a little shard of glass or something in my foot, and what I say is that that's what the bib pins are for."
Translation: he uses the safety pins from his race bib to dig out debris on the go. Years of this have given him a grim confidence in his own foot care.
"I could perform minor surgery on my feet now."
Running through the center of the road during the NYC Marathon helps. "Running in the center of the road is a lot cleaner anyway," Mazzei said. But he added a caveat: "Still, you get into certain parts of the city that are rougher than others." Trail running and trail half marathons, also barefoot, round out his résumé. Gravel, he said, is the single worst surface: "The hardest thing to run on is gravel."
Mazzei teaches ballroom dance for a living, and he sees a direct connection between that work and his ability to run without shoes. "I think because I'm a dancer, I love teaching technique," he said. "I love the concentration, studying the technique of barefoot running." The discipline of learning precise footwork in a studio, in other words, carries over to learning how to land each stride on asphalt without protection.
The Goshen marathon showed his spontaneous side. Mazzei signed up the day of the race, catching organizers off guard. "They were surprised I signed up that day," he recalled. "'Oh, you're signing up for a marathon today?' Did you know you were going to do this marathon? I said I didn't really." He ran it barefoot anyway.
Mazzei is skipping this year's NYC Marathon. His focus has shifted to qualifying for the Boston Marathon, a race that requires runners to hit a time standard based on age and gender, making it one of the few major marathons that demands proof you belong on the starting line. Whether he has met that standard yet is unclear; as of the article's publication in August 2026, he was still working toward it.
He knows the looks he gets. "I do get those looks like I'm crazy or whatever," he said. "But it works for me." When pressed on what keeps him going through blisters, glass, and rough pavement at 57, his answer is simple.
"I'm not feeling anything adverse on my feet or anything. I just keep going."
Asked what he values most about the whole experience, Mazzei didn't talk about finish times or personal records. "I'd say the people you meet definitely are the most rewarding part," he said.
In a culture that sells $250 running shoes and tells you the right gear is half the battle, a 57-year-old dance teacher from Long Island is making a quiet case that grit, technique, and bare feet will get you across the finish line just fine.
