Next month, Maxim Bellenoue will become likely the first East Hampton High School student ever to run in the New York City Marathon, and will be among the youngest of the more than 55,000 runners expected to take part.
The minimum age for the marathon is 18; he turned 18 on Sept. 16.
Maxim and his mother, Danielle Epstein, a nurse at the high school, are members of Fred’s Team, the running program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center named in honor of the marathon’s founder, Fred Lebow. They’re running to raise money for cancer research at Sloan Kettering, where his stepfather, Nick Epstein, has been treated since his diagnosis in 2024.
“So it’s kind of come full circle, with us picking M.S.K. as a way to do this,” Maxim said.
For Maxim, a senior who is a co-captain of the high school cross-country team, running has been a way to cope with his father’s diagnosis. “Running for me is really meditative,” he said at his house last week. “It’s my space to think about everything going on in my life and make peace with it. And my mom really is an inspiration to me, with how much work she puts into making this whole kind of crazy mess bearable in a lot of ways.”
Maxim has been running since seventh grade, though reluctantly at the very beginning, when six months into the pandemic his mom insisted he do a sport. They settled on cross-country, despite his protestations.
“He was not a natural,” she said. “He worked really hard.” After about two weeks, though, “he was all in.” In high school he runs all three seasons -cross-country in the fall and then winter and spring track.
“Max has always been an endurance freak,” his cross-country coach, Kevin Barry, said. “Even as a ninth grader,” Maxim often said that “his goal was to do a marathon. . . . He’s very motivated and driven. He gave his running a purpose, for both himself and the team.”
His mom, however, wasn’t yet a runner when their application to join Fred’s Team was accepted early last spring. “They found our story quite touching,” he said. “I’m so proud of her for her joining me.”
“She’s put in a lot more time than I have with the training, and hopefully after this we’ll be able to run together.”
“In terms of training, the bulk of my mileage comes from cross-country,” Maxim said. Coach Barry has helped him to manage his marathon training alongside training for school meets and invitationals.
“He’s an amazing young man, one of the kindest you will ever come across,”
Coach Barry said, adding that the co-captain has been a wonderful mentor to the freshmen on the team.
The team practices every day after school; on weekends Maxim will do a 16 or 17-mile run. “I’m building gradually, and I feel confident.” He’ll top out at 18 or 19 miles over the next few weeks before pulling back as he prepares to run 26.2 on Nov. 2. “Marathon running is just all mental, and I have to think about nutrition and recovery way more.”
“Maxim has been a huge inspiration to me,” his mother said. “He’s a great coach.”
When she started training, “he would always be running with me with the biggest smile, and just saying, ‘You’re doing great.’ . . . And that got me going.” At the same time, “Really what I was thinking was, ‘If I’m trying to encourage my husband to fight, maybe I have to find the place where I know what it feels like’ — I can’t possibly know what that feels like . . . but maybe I can do something hard too.”
Her longest run so far: “I had to walk the last mile and a half, but I did 17 and a half,” she said. “And I cried a little bit of the way.”
Nick Epstein said he is “overwhelmed with the effort that you guys are putting in” and proud to see them working so hard to prepare for the marathon. “I think it’s really amazing.”
Danielle and Maxim met some of the other 1,200 or so Fred’s Team members at a run last month in New York, and felt an immediate connection.
“At first, the idea was to do something good related to our situation,” she said. “And then, there was the realization that being part of a larger community was very nourishing. And then, the actual act of running . . . it became really healing and strengthening, the realization that when you are going through something extraordinarily impossible, that moving through it, being in motion, there’s something really powerful about that.”
She said she is grateful to Memorial Sloan Kettering for the opportunity “to connect with other families moving through the same complex experiences. We are inspired by and committed to the idea that life can be painful, but it’s possible to do hard things. There is strength in feeling the ground beneath one’s feet and communicating to others that they are not alone.”
On Nov. 2, Danielle, Maxim, and all the members of Fred’s Team will run in brightorangeT-shirts,soifyou’rethere to watch, they’ll be hard to miss. Maxim will run in wave one, right after the elite runners.
“I have no doubt that Max will complete the marathon and reach his goal,” Coach Barry said.
As of Sunday evening, mother and son had raised nearly $7,000 of their $12,000 goal. Donations to their team, which will fund research for the cancer of their choice, can be made through the Fred's Team website.
When the marathon is over, Maxim will start preparing for winter track. He and his mom are looking to become facilitators for a grief group called E-Motion, which Danielle described as a “motion therapy” group that focuses on “how you can move through grief and you can heal.” She hopes that they could start a local E-Motion group in time to train for the May Day 5K in East Hampton Village next spring.
