The Hoag OC Marathon Running Festival returns to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa this weekend for its 22nd edition, with race director Gary Kutscher confirming that 25,000 entrants are now committed across the marathon, half-marathon, 5K and Kids Run the OC Final Mile, and that both the full and half are sold out for the second consecutive year. The Hoag-sponsored event begins at the OC Fair & Event Center on Friday 1 May with a two-day Health and Fitness Expo, escalates to a 17:00 Pacific 5K on Saturday evening, and culminates in the half-marathon at 06:00 and the marathon at 06:15 on Sunday morning. The marathon is point-to-point from Newport Beach Civic Center to Costa Mesa.
This year's festival is also the first under a new title-sponsor watch partnership with COROS. The Irvine-based wearable manufacturer was announced in February as the official race-watch supplier and is debuting both an OC-branded edition of the COROS Pace 4 — limited to 1,500 units, all bib-numbered — and a course-specific live-tracking integration that pushes runner splits, pace and projected finish straight from athlete watches into the OC Marathon app and Hoag's spectator dashboard. The partnership replaces a six-year Garmin sponsorship that lapsed at the end of 2025 and represents COROS's largest US road-event commitment to date.
The Hoag OC course was repaved through Costa Mesa's Adams Avenue corridor in February, and Kutscher confirmed last week that the certification was re-validated by USATF on 14 April with no change in distance or net elevation. The course remains net downhill at -130 feet from start to finish — modestly fast by SoCal standards, though slower than the Surf City marathon — with the run beginning along the bluffs above Crystal Cove State Park, dropping onto Pacific Coast Highway at mile 6, climbing through Back Bay Drive to the half-marathon junction at mile 13, and rolling through the South Coast Plaza commercial district before finishing at the OC Fair & Event Center grandstand. The half-marathon shares the first 13 miles before splitting east on Bristol Street.
The elite-invitational programme is small but pointed at the women's race, where Hoag's local sponsorship has retained 2024 winner and Costa Mesa native Carrie Verdon for a third consecutive year. Verdon ran 2:35:19 last year on a humid morning to win by 38 seconds and has confirmed she will target the 2:33:18 women's course record set by Sarah Sellers in 2023. The men's field is led by US Olympic Trials qualifier Tyler Pennel, who is using OC as a Berlin tune-up, and 2023 OC champion Brian Shrader. The men's course record stands at 2:14:01, set by Antonio Vega in 2014 — older than any other major US spring road record by a wide margin, and a target the elite invite is privately hoping to put under threat this year.
The weather forecast is the OC weekend's classic uncertainty. The National Weather Service's Sunday morning forecast for Newport Beach has marine-layer cloud at 06:00 lifting at around 09:30, a starting temperature of 13 degrees Celsius and a finish-line reading near 19 by the time the slowest of the 25,000 runners crosses the OC Fair & Event Center mat. A shallow southerly seabreeze is forecast to back to a westerly tail-cross around 09:00, neither helpful nor punishing, and the marine-layer humidity should keep dew points in the low fifties for the duration of the elite race. PCH closes from 04:00 Sunday to 13:00, with full reopening at 14:00 — the standard OC Marathon plan, and the same one that made last year's race the smoothest road-closure operation Caltrans District 12 has run on a marathon weekend since the festival's 2007 founding.