The Big Sur International Marathon returns to Highway 1 on Sunday April 26, with 4,500 runners due on the start line at 6.45 a.m. Pacific for the 39th running of the coast's most scenic point-to-point race. The course begins in the redwoods of Big Sur and drops 356 feet to the finish in Carmel-by-the-Sea over a rolling 26.2-mile profile that loses more than it gains, but that also climbs 526 feet in one sustained 2.2-mile ascent up Hurricane Point at mile 10. Organisers have confirmed that the race is fully sold out, the expo at Monterey's Portola Plaza has been open since Friday morning, and the long-range marine-layer forecast for Sunday morning shows fog lifting by 8 a.m. with a light north-westerly breeze at Hurricane Point that will not exceed 12 mph.
Hurricane Point is the definitive Big Sur feature. The climb is not technical, but the open coastline funnels air off the Pacific, and on windier years the ascent has been known to turn a 7:30 mile into a 9:30. This year's forecast is kinder, which opens the door to faster finishing times from both the elite field and the competitive age-grouper tier. The descent that follows is 2.3 miles of loose, cambered highway into the halfway point at the Bixby Bridge — the image every Big Sur runner carries home — where the Carmel Symphony's grand piano has, since 1988, been played live from the back of a flatbed trailer while the entire field rolls past. The piano tradition skipped the 2020 and 2021 virtual editions, and the 39th edition's organisers have confirmed it returns in full for Sunday.
The elite field is small but notable. Sara Vaughn headlines the American women's entries, with a 2:23:24 personal best that makes her the fastest woman to toe a Big Sur start line since Sally Meyerhoff in 2011. On the men's side, Tyler McCandless, Nick Hauger and Josh Izewski lead an invited field that features a $20,000 prize purse and a $5,000 time bonus for a sub-2:30 course record — a mark that has stood since Brad Hawthorne's 2:27:40 in 1987 and that nobody has come within three minutes of in a decade. Course records here are always a different calculus: the field is capped at 4,500, the altitude varies between 10 and 560 feet, and the wind is the variable that decides whether the day is quick or merely memorable.
Big Sur is a Boston qualifier, but it is not a Boston tune-up. Most of the field has raced Boston on Patriots' Day the week before, and a small but devoted community uses the two races as the Boston 2 Big Sur challenge, wearing a commemorative medal at the finish in Carmel that interlocks with their Boston medal from the previous Monday. Organisers have confirmed 421 Boston 2 Big Sur finishers on this year's entry list, the highest since 2019. The challenge is a reminder of how Big Sur sits in the US marathon calendar: not a time-trial, but a pilgrimage that rewards strength and equanimity over speed.
Race organisers have again partnered with the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula for on-course medical coverage, and the course will close at 1 p.m. with a six-hour overall cut-off. Highway 1 will be closed in both directions from Big Sur Station to Rio Road in Carmel for the duration of the race, with shuttle services running from the finish area to the start between 3.15 a.m. and 5.45 a.m. Spectator access is restricted along the course itself — Highway 1 is a single road with no parallel route — but the Bixby Bridge viewing points and the Carmel Mission finish chute are open to ticketed supporters. Sunday will also mark the return of the Big Sur 21-miler, 10.6-miler, 12K, 5K and 3K "just run" events, held on adjacent sections of the course and concluding before the marathon's lead runners arrive at the finish.