Running 🏃, viral food 🍲, and international films 🎥

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

Brenner here. Yesterday I ran the NYC Marathon. While I’m proud to share I ran it in 3:57:05, beating my target time of four hours, the experience was so much more than a few digits on the clock. The race starts on the Verrazzano Bridge with a mile uphill run, then a steep downhill entering into Brooklyn which made it near impossible to find my pace (my first mile was 9:40, my second was 7:40). In Brooklyn, while the terrain is pretty calm, the crowd is chaotic. DJs and live music line the streets along with people handing out everything from bananas to their Halloween candy from the night before. The Pulaski Bridge makes for a quick stop in Queens before embarking up the famed Queensboro Bridge. In anticipation of crossing over, I turned off my music so I could experience the silence. Over the grueling mile of incline and into a slow descent, all I could hear was my breath and the footsteps around me. That silence gradually crescendos into the roar of the cheering crowd as I enter Manhattan.

Through the Upper East Side and the Bronx, it feels like I’m nearing the finish, but there’s still about five miles left on the return to Manhattan, including a big uphill run along Fifth Avenue on mile 24. That’s where the adrenaline starts to kick in. Turning into the park, everyone is screaming, and I can feel the finish line nearing. As I finally cross it, a wave of accomplishment sweeps over me and then my ability to walk completely vanishes but at least it’s done and I can celebrate. However, that was just my experience.

I can only imagine what everyone else was going through. On Thursday, I attended a banquet dinner for Sharsheret, the charity I ran with. They support women affected by breast and ovarian cancer and their families. One by one, we went around the room, and everyone shared the story of what brought them to that moment. Some just wanted to take part in the action. Others were representing a wife, mother, sister or friend who had fought (or was still fighting) a battle with breast cancer. Multiply that room of 50 by 60,000 runners, then the 2 million people on the sidelines, then the cops, the volunteers handing out water cups, and the crews who cleared the potholes. Each had their own reason too, and almost none I’ll ever hear. There’s a word for that: sonder, the realization that every stranger has a life as vivid and complicated as your own. Thursday was the rare night I got to hear some of them aloud.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where many different reasons lead people to the same moment. The NYC Marathon (the story so nice we wrote about it twice) may have set a new participation record as people from around the world came together for yesterday’s race. A ramen once too spicy to sell was turned into a staple by fans daring, cooking, and gifting it. And more than 100 films, including three from countries entering for the first time, are lining up for the same Oscar.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

When the New York City Marathon first began in 1970, it was four laps around Central Park with 127 runners, only 55 of whom finished. Yesterday's marathon marked the 50th anniversary of the five-borough course with nearly 60,000 runners. The official finisher data isn’t published for a few more days, but 2026 is expected to break the record for largest marathon for a third consecutive year (currently held by London’s April marathon).

Race day is about more than just the runners. Over 2 million people flood the streets to cheer for strangers, line the fences with signs for their friends, yell out from nearby fire escapes, and dart from borough to borough trying to catch their loved ones on the course. That’s about 33 people cheering per runner. It’s the single largest gathering of people in New York City every year – not hard to see why it’s widely regarded as the best day to be a New Yorker.

Top of the funnel: more people than ever are itching to join in on the fun. This year's race drew 240,000 applicants for the general lottery, with roughly 1% winning a spot. Those lucky winners run alongside charity runners and people who qualify on their time. New York Road Runners’ 670-plus charity partners are aiming to raise over $100 million collectively. Last year, runners came from all 50 states and 132 different countries and ranged from 18 all the way to 91. Yesterday, David Obelkevich, an 83-year-old from the Upper West Side, completed his 51st NYC Marathon. He's the only one to have finished every five-borough race since it began in 1976.

Zooming out: running is growing well beyond yesterday’s spectacle. Strava, the social running app, framed the year’s trend as logging off and lacing up. Gen Z is nearly 40% more likely than their parents’ generation to use exercise as a way to meet people. The Outdoor Industry Association reported that 52.3 million Americans road-ran in 2025, but most of them don’t run often, they’re just showing up for the experience.

The benefits: six months of training made first-time marathoners’ arteries about four years younger. But it doesn’t take a marathon. A review of 14 studies across 232,000 people found that any amount of running was linked to 27% lower risk of death from all causes. Running once a week, or under 50 minutes a week, still showed benefit.

People run for a variety of reasons whether it’s a cause, a friend, their health, or just for the company. In New York, a city built on grit and determination, the marathon brings people together from all over the world, regardless of culture, religion, politics, or anything else, to celebrate a triumph of human spirit and the work it took to get there. As David put it, “Anyone can start it, but it takes a good person to finish.”

On October 1^st between 5 and 6pm Pacific, 355 people posted TikToks of themselves eating Buldak, the spicy instant noodles made by South Korean company Samyang Foods. Buldak literally means “fire chicken” and the product is famous for its heat. The viral stunt was organized by Buldak’s US arm and earned a Guinness World Record for most videos of people eating instant noodles uploaded to TikTok in an hour (one of the 65,000 world records tracked apparently).

The flip side: usually, viral foods, or really any viral consumer trends, see a massive spike in demand around the event followed by a steep drop into oblivion. That’s exactly what happened with Logan Paul and KSI’s sports drink, Prime. After it launched in 2022, UK scarcity got so intense that a secondary black market formed among school children. Within a year, it had gone from $1.2 billion in projected sales to a product retailers could barely sell, plus a lawsuit in which its own manufacturer blamed “fading social media buzz.”

Buldak and Prime got famous the same way but ended up in very different places. Buldak’s story began in 2010 when Kim Jung-soo watched restaurant diners sweating and fanning their tongues while shoveling their food down. She told Samyang’s food scientists to make their noodles even hotter. Buldak launched in 2012 to a resounding flop. Retailers and shoppers alike called it too spicy. Two years later, the Korean Englishman YouTube channel posted a video that got 11 million views and created the first viral moment: the “fire noodle challenge.” Buldak marked a resurgence for a company that was insolvent in the late 90s, after a false accusation about its ingredients dragged on for eight years and ran right into the Asian financial crisis.

Next, the dare became a recipe. A milder Carbonara flavor arrived in 2017, and by late 2023, TikTok was full of people cooking Buldak with milk and cheese. 2024 marked its peak frenzy. Cardi B drove 30 minutes to find a pack as stores were selling out left and right. The sellouts made headlines, but demand never came back down.  Samyang’s sales are up over 35% in back-to-back years and over 10 billion Buldak packs have been sold cumulatively. In the US, sales went from $50 million in 2023 to $419 million in 2025.

Why it lasted: First, Americans love spicy foods (in fact, over half of Americans are likely to buy something labeled spicy). Second, and more importantly, Buldak’s virality had staying power by embracing the fans that gave it a platform. Samyang leans into it: a TikTok of a young American girl sobbing with joy after getting Buldak Carbonara as a birthday present received over 100 million views. Instead of issuing a press release, Samyang’s US team visited the family in person. Prime was built for fans, but Buldak was built by them. And fourteen years after it was too spicy to sell, Buldak is still the hottest thing on the shelf.

Every year, one Oscar is reserved for a feature made outside of the United States, mostly not in English. Originally the Best Foreign Language Film, it was renamed International Feature Film in 2019. Each country chooses one film through a national committee. Also, non-English winners of the top prize at certain major festivals (Cannes, Sundance, etc.) get a spot on their own. For the first time ever, over 100 films were submitted, beating the previous record of 93, set in 2021.

This year’s slate includes movies from three countries entering for the first time: Rwanda (Ben’Imana by Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo), Cyprus (Hold Onto Me by Myrsini Aristidou), and El Salvador (Vertices by Arturo Lopez Rodas). Dusabejambo was trained as an electronics and telecommunications engineer and taught herself filmmaking, starting in 2008 with shorts. Ben’Imana took about 12 years to make and won the Camera d’Or award at Cannes, the prize for best first feature.

Why it matters: film allows us to step into someone else’s view and gain perspective on a new story. As Nicole Kidman so eloquently puts it in AMC theaters, “we go somewhere we’ve never been before; not just entertained, but somehow reborn.” International films amplify that otherworldly feeling by connecting us with a culture we’d otherwise never get to experience. International movies have long belonged to Europe: Italy has the most wins (14), France the most nominations (41). But the tide is turning. In 2020, the Korean film Parasite won Best Picture, the first non-English movie to ever win the award.

Meanwhile, the emergence of streaming and cheap content has people worried about the movie industry hollowing out (not to mention the addition of short-form content and AI more recently). In reality, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) credits cheaper digital tools and streaming services for increasing filmmaking’s accessibility. Dusabejambo, for example, started with a neighborhood film group, not a film school. The tools she used to teach herself have never been cheaper.

In 2024, there were over 9,600 feature films made worldwide, more than double the numbers from 20 years earlier. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, Turkey’s film output jumped by half and Ukraine’s tripled. Today, half of the original new releases on Netflix are non-English. Nicole Kidman promised us somewhere we’ve never been before. Now the list of countries keeps growing: Papua New Guinea and Zambia have formed committees to enter the award race.