The 2026 Tamarack Ottawa Marathon stepped off Wellington Street on Sunday morning into the kind of cool, low-cloud Ottawa Valley weather most elite marathons would order from a catalogue if they could. Race organisers Run Ottawa moved the elite field away just after 07:00, with the open 12,000-runner mass field rolling behind them through Centretown, across the Pretoria Bridge and out onto the Rideau Canal pathway — the same opening sequence that produced last year's deep finish times across both men's and women's races.
On the men's side, Calgary's Rory Linkletter returned to Ottawa just five weeks after a 14th-place 2:06:04 personal best at Boston, looking to better the runner-up finish he banked here a year ago. Linkletter has spent the spring training block working specifically on the second half of the course — the long climb back through Lowertown and the closing miles down to Confederation Park — and was paired in the field with a four-deep Ethiopian contingent led by Lee Wesselius (2:13:52) and a clutch of pacers contracted to bring the lead pack through halfway near 1:03:15. Run Ottawa's elite-athlete page had described the men's race as the strongest domestic-flavoured Ottawa field since 2019, and Linkletter sat near the front of the lead group in the opening kilometres.
The women's race brought what is arguably the more loaded elite list of the weekend. Natasha Wodak made her Ottawa Marathon debut in her first marathon since finishing 31st at September's 2025 World Championships in Tokyo, taking aim at a sharper second-half split than her Sapporo time and committing to running with the lead group rather than letting it slip away early. Wodak faced 11 Ethiopian athletes in the field, headlined by Meseret Belete, whose 2:18:21 from her 2023 Amsterdam Marathon win was the fastest seed time in the women's race. Malindi Elmore — who had run the Saturday 10K at the Canadian Championships less than 36 hours earlier — was not on the marathon start list, but several of her Asics Canada teammates were.
Conditions favoured the second half of the field as much as the front. Temperatures at gun time sat at 9°C with a light westerly that the Rideau Canal stretch eats into a runner's chest only for the final three kilometres back along Colonel By Drive. Run Ottawa had quietly resurfaced two of the worst-camber sections on the half-marathon split route over the autumn, and the marathon's wheelchair start — which set off twenty minutes ahead of the runners — was over the closing stretch in a hair under 1:38, exactly the elite split Tamarack had targeted for the broader event clock.
The 2026 weekend completed a build that Run Ottawa had pitched as a return to the pre-pandemic form of the race, with the elite story arc deliberately tied to the Saturday Canadian 10K Championships and the Sunday marathon's domestic prize money. Linkletter, Wodak and Wesselius are all carded for Berlin or Chicago in the autumn, and a strong Sunday in Ottawa keeps Athletics Canada's marathon picture for next year's World Championships in good order. Official results, final times and the open field's overall finisher count will be published on the Run Ottawa results portal once timing has been finalised, and Running Lookout will run a full results recap and analysis as splits are released.