Ariana Grande picked up a pen on a New York sidewalk on Sunday, November 1, wrote “You did it!” with a few hearts, signed it “Ari + Ricky” and handed it to a stranger with a very large envelope. Hours later a runner named Ellie, fresh off 26.2 miles, opened it and realized who had written it. The clip of her reaction has pulled in more than 624,000 likes in its first 13 hours on Instagram.
The stranger with the envelope is Ella Schweiger, a presenter and creator who posts as @ellaschweigerr and runs a project called Ella’s Envelope. The idea is simple: she asks people to write a kind message for someone they will never meet, then delivers those notes to runners who have just finished a race.
“AND ARIANA GRANDE WROTE ONE!!!” she wrote in the caption, adding that she still could not quite believe it had happened.
How the note got from Ariana to Ellie
Grande and her boyfriend, Ricky Alvarez, were watching the New York City Marathon from the sidelines when Schweiger approached them. According to her post and the footage, the singer agreed on the spot, wrote the message and signed it for both of them.
Schweiger then delivered the envelope to Ellie after the finish. In the video, the runner’s face moves from polite curiosity to disbelief and then to full excitement as the name sinks in. Ellie said she had been listening to Grande’s music during the race, and that one song had helped her through a brutal stretch around mile 24.
“ariana, thank you for being part of it and to everyone who wrote a message, you made someone’s day,” Schweiger wrote, before congratulating Ellie on finishing.
The numbers behind the reaction
When Badiyaa checked the post at about 8:10 a.m. IST on Tuesday, November 3, it showed 624,800 likes, roughly 1,700 comments and 8,600 shares, with the location tagged as New York, New York. The caption had been edited, which is common when creators fix typos after a clip takes off.
The comments are a wall of hearts and capital letters. One reply with more than 500 likes put it this way: “She probably felt a rare moment of feeling normal. How cool!” Another, from a commenter who seems to know Schweiger personally, simply reads: “OH MY GOD ELLA.”
Put those figures against the race itself and the scale is striking. Nearly 60,000 athletes ran the course through Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan on Sunday, so by Monday night the clip had collected more than ten likes for every single finisher on the course.
A milestone year for the marathon
The timing added weight. The 2026 race marked the 50th anniversary of the five-borough course, which organizers introduced in 1976 when the event moved out of Central Park and spread across the city. That makes this year’s finishers part of a round-number edition, and Ellie’s envelope one of the more unusual souvenirs from it.
Grande did not run, and the post does not say exactly where on the course she and Alvarez were standing. What the video does show is the exchange, the note and the delivery. The couple, who went public on Instagram in August after rekindling their relationship earlier this year, appear briefly and then let the runner take over the frame.
What Ella’s Envelope actually does
The project is not a one-off stunt. Schweiger collects messages from passers-by before and during an event, keeps them in her oversized envelope and hands them out at the finish. The runner never knows who wrote theirs. That is the whole point: the Grande note worked because Ellie expected a few kind words from a stranger, not a signature from a pop star.
The verified clip is the one on Schweiger’s own Instagram account, posted from New York on Monday, November 2. Anyone searching for it should look there rather than at the reposts already circulating; several fan accounts had copied the footage within hours.
Schweiger ended her caption with a promise to post more “ripples of kindness” from the marathon over the coming days, so Ellie’s envelope may not be the last one to surface from this year’s race.
Image: taconicrr, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
