Leiba Rimler (women), Shlomo Schreiber (men) are LI Marathon winners

Leiba Rimler still hates marathons, though not as much now. Winning them has softened her stance.

“I don’t hate them as much as I used to,” said Rimler, a 37-year-old librarian from Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. “I think you have to do a certain number of them before your body gets used to them and you’re not totally wrecked.”

Rimler, who won the Suffolk County Marathon in 2019, won the Long Island Marathon on Sunday. She finished the 26.2-mile course, which starts and finishes at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, in three hours, seven minutes, 14.4 seconds. Far Rockaway’s Shlomo Schreiber won the men’s marathon in 2:36:58.1, a personal best for the first-time winner, he said.

Rimler has run 11 marathons and doesn’t think she’ll stop anytime soon.

“Now I feel like I have to keep doing them until I run sub-three [hours],” she said.

The day marked the return of the marathon to the first Sunday in May. The pandemic canceled the in-person race in 2020, with runners being asked to run the distance on their own and enter their results online. In 2021, the pandemic forced organizers to move the race to September, which required runners to compete in warmer-than-ideal conditions.

Sunday was picture-perfect, with temperatures in the low-to-mid-60s and a slight breeze. Runners usually can find something wrong with the conditions on any race day, but that was tough to do on Sunday.

“It was nice in the beginning,” Rimler said. “It got a little warm at the end, but I’m not going to complain. I like warm weather.”

Despite her complicated relationship with marathons, Rimler has done a lot of them in the last year. She did three in three months in the fall — the Chasing the Unicorn Marathon in Pennsylvania, the Boston Marathon and the New York Marathon — thanks to a bunch of pandemic-related race schedule changes.

“I wouldn’t have planned it like that,” Rimler said. “It just fell out that way. After the first one, I felt horrible. I couldn’t move. The second one wasn’t so bad, and the third one I felt fine. I guess the best practice for marathons is running marathons.”

Rimler, who ran the half-marathon in 1:32:14.2 Sunday, said she was all alone in the second half of the race and was glad the course was well-marked.

“I couldn’t see anybody,” she said. “That part was hard. I was also afraid I would get lost because I have a horrible sense of direction. It was the second loop, so I had done it before. That helped a little.”

Schreiber, 29, moved away from the men’s field at the halfway point.

“We came through halfway at [1:19:03.5]. I turned to the guy next to me, who for the first minute or two was ahead of me,” said Schreiber, who owns Town Appliance in Cedarhurst and New Jersey with his family. “I said to him, ‘What was your personal best in the half?’ He said 1:18. I knew that any minute, it was over . . . Once I had it in the bag at 21 [miles], it was a smooth sail.”

He won the race by 2 1⁄2 minutes.

Schreiber said he stopped counting his finished marathons but thinks it’s about eight.

“Nothing you ever do is ever easy. You try a couple times and you fail,” he said. “It’s a blessing to get through healthy. I’m really grateful. My family is here. That kept me going forward to it . . . It was magical. I’m blessed.”

Brian Petrocelli, 44, of Fresh Meadows won the men’s half marathon in 1:19:27.6. Lauren Perschetz, 26, of Manhattan won the women’s half in 1:28:47.2.

“Everything was perfect,” said Petrocelli, an electrician. “I feel like it’s been windy for months. Everyday training, there’s always wind. Then today was just perfect. You couldn’t get luckier.”