Des Linden will walk into the Hopkinton athletes' village on Monday morning wearing Wave 1 colours for the first time in her career, a small but pointed signal that the 2018 Boston Marathon champion's relationship with this course has entered a new chapter. The 42-year-old Michigan resident announced at last year's race that her 2025 appearance would be her final professional Boston Marathon, and she has kept her word: she accepted a regular qualifier's bib for 2026 and will run the race without the pressure of a contract, a target time or a podium to chase.
Linden's Boston ledger is one of the most decorated of any American woman of her generation. She has run the race thirteen times as a professional, finished in the top ten on ten occasions, and became the first American woman to win Boston in 33 years when she powered to victory through biblical headwinds and sleet in April 2018. Her breakthrough that day is now embedded in the race's folklore, alongside the images of her shepherding Shalane Flanagan through a mid-race bathroom stop and, earlier in the race, telling Molly Huddle "whatever you need" as the conditions threatened to break the field apart.
The 2026 cameo comes just eight days after Linden finished third at the Marathon des Sables, the six-stage, 250-kilometre self-supported race through the Moroccan Sahara that she entered in part to raise awareness for her Keep Running Collective non-profit. She told reporters in the finish chute in Ouarzazate that she had completed the race on minimal fuel and was "running on fumes" heading into the Boston build-up, but that she intended to honour the commitment to run the course one more time in Wave 1. A finish time, she said, was not a consideration; high-fiving spectators was.
Linden's retirement from professional marathoning does not mean retirement from competition. She has pivoted decisively into ultrarunning since the end of 2025, finishing fourth at Black Canyon 100K in her debut at the distance and signalling her interest in a Western States 100 entry further down the line. She owns the American masters marathon record of 2:28:04, set at the 2023 Chicago Marathon the autumn after her 40th birthday, and has made clear that improving on the master's side of the ledger is now secondary to exploring longer, slower formats.
For the wider American running community, Monday's run represents a quiet farewell to one of the most stable and candid voices the sport has had over the past two decades. Linden arrives at Hopkinton without fanfare and without expectations, which is exactly how she has always run her best races. Somewhere around mile 23, where she hit the front for the first time in 2018 and never looked back, the cheers on Beacon Street will be louder than they would be for almost any other Wave 1 runner — and that, say those close to her, is precisely the kind of ending she wanted.