Scotland's biggest running festival is back in three weeks, with the Edinburgh Marathon Festival staging its 23rd edition across the weekend of 23 and 24 May. The Saturday programme — 5K, 10K and the popular Junior Races — kicks the city's running carnival off from Holyrood Park, before Sunday's marathon, half marathon and team relay take over the closed roads from the Royal Mile out along the Firth of Forth coast.
The marathon route, broadly unchanged since 2018, is widely cited as the fastest 26.2 in the United Kingdom: a long, loose downhill from the city through Portobello and Musselburgh, followed by a sea-level out-and-back along the East Lothian coast that picks up runners at Prestonpans before retracing the route to a finish at Pinkie Playing Fields in Musselburgh. Even allowing for an exposed section that can punish runners on a south-westerly wind, the course profile gives well-prepared club runners every chance of a personal best, and entry numbers are once again capped at the festival's 30,000-participant ceiling.
Organisers confirmed last week that all of the Sunday distances had sold out for an 18th consecutive year, with the marathon shifting its final places before the end of February. That fall-off-a-cliff demand has continued to lift Edinburgh into the conversation about which UK marathon, behind London, deserves a place on the spring shortlist for international visitors. With Manchester moving to a new May date and Brighton already on the run-up to its 30th anniversary, this year's Edinburgh Marathon Festival arrives in unusually competitive company on the domestic spring road calendar.
The elite field will be light by Tokyo or London standards but is once again likely to feature a strong Scottish-domiciled cohort: officials have hinted at a number of British marathoners using the race as a sub-2:15 attempt, and the half marathon — staged half an hour after the marathon start — has historically attracted a tighter front pack than the longer race. The Para events again include both visually impaired and wheelchair categories, with the wheelchair start at 9:35am preceding the mass marathon by 15 minutes to avoid congestion through the busy Holyrood Park exit.
Beyond the racing, the festival now functions as one of the larger fundraising weekends of the British calendar. Organisers said last year's edition pushed total charitable funds raised since 2003 above £100m, with NHS Lothian, Beatson Cancer Charity and a long tail of regional partners now joined by national charities that recognise Edinburgh's place on the spring road calendar. With Wings for Life World Run already on the same weekend last year, and the Bath Half having shifted dates, Edinburgh is now firmly the focal point of the closing fortnight of the British spring marathon season.