Staten Island man who lost nearly 200 pounds will be running the NYC Marathon

This year’s NYC Marathon carries a lot of personal weight for Joe Macklin — who’s running after losing a jaw-dropping 190 pounds.The 432-pound Staten Islander realized he needed to make a change to his own life after he learned that an acquaintance had lost theirs.“In September of 2024, a friend of a friend, who was very heavy, ended up passing away,” Macklin, 25, who now weighs 240 pounds, told The Post on Friday from the pickleball court at St.Christopher in Dongan Hills.So he decided to get gastric bypass surgery.

“And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m healthy enough, let’s see what the doctor says if I’m able to get the surgery,’ because we always talked about it.” Even before he went under the knife, he started shedding weight.The requirements for the five-hour surgery was that he follow a liquid diet, undergo an endoscopy, see a cardiologist and get evaluated by a psychologist.Right after his successful surgery at Staten Island University Hospital in December 2024, he was already down to 388 pounds.In a week he dropped an additional 20 pounds — and it was off to the races from there.“After that, once I started exercising, I was losing 10 to 12 pounds a week,” he said.Three months after surgery, he started to think about running the TCS New York City Marathon.“I always kept saying, ‘I want to run the marathon,’ and I was like, ‘With that weight I’ll never run,'” said Macklin, who grew up in Emerson Hill and still lives there.He started by walking with his mother, Renee.“I would walk for 45 minutes alone, and then I would bring her for 25 minutes.So then those walks ended up becoming me starting to run,” he said.As fate would have it, Macklin’s father, John, is a director of operations at Brean Capital and the boss of former Bengals and Jets quarterback Boomer Esiason’s nephew.

And in July, received a call that the athlete’s foundation needed an additional runner for the Nov.1 marathon.

“He said, ‘I have a...