San Francisco's Bay to Breakers, the world's longest continuously held footrace, will roll out for the 115th time on Sunday 17 May at 8:00 a.m., starting at the corner of Howard and Main on the Embarcadero and tracing its now-traditional 12K route across nine neighbourhoods to the Pacific at Ocean Beach. Race organiser Capstone Event Group confirmed last week that wave starts will run through 8:45 a.m. and that the field is again capped at 30,000 entrants, a quota the event has filled in each of the past three years.
The competitive front of the race will be back too, after a 2024 edition that ran without an elite-only seeded wave for the first time since 1996. Defending men's champion James Mwaura, the Idaho-born Boise State graduate who took the 12K last May in 35:08, returns to defend the title and is joined in the elite men's field by 2024 NYC Half winner Wesley Kiptoo and US 10K champion Diego Estrada. The women's race headlines feature defending champion Aliphine Tuliamuk, who broke 38 minutes for the first time at Bay to Breakers in 2025, and 2025 Bolder Boulder runner-up Stephanie Bruce.
The course itself remains a bargain in elevation terms despite its costumed-chaos reputation. Runners face a single concentrated climb up Hayes Hill in the second mile — the steepest sustained gradient on any major US road race east of San Francisco's own Cliff House — before the route flattens through the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park and the Outer Sunset to a long downhill to the Pacific. World-record-eligible course certification was reapproved by USA Track & Field in February, after a slight realignment around the Stanyan Street construction zone shaved 30 m off the previous configuration.
New for 2026 is the 15K Breakers Bonus, an opt-in extension that picks up at the original 12K finish and adds a 3 km loop along the Great Highway and back to a separate finish line on Ocean Beach. Capstone built the option in response to a survey of 2025 entrants in which more than half said they would consider a longer event if it left the existing course intact, and the longer race carries its own age-group medals and a separate live broadcast slot on NBC Sports Bay Area. Roughly 2,800 of the 30,000 registered runners had opted in by the end of registration.
The wider weekend remains the costume parade and street festival that has defined the race since 1912, with the centipede team category — runners in single-file linked costumes — back at full capacity and the post-race finish-line festival on the Great Highway running from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. The race is one of three major spring road events on the western US calendar in May; combined with the Eugene Half on 25 May and the Pittsburgh Marathon today, it is part of the cluster of mid-spring road races that bridges the Boston-London window and the start of the summer track season. Live coverage from 7:50 a.m. on 17 May will be carried on NBC Sports Bay Area and streamed on Peacock.