The 31st Volkswagen Prague Marathon takes the world's spring marathon caravan inland on Sunday 3 May, with the gun firing at 08:00 from Old Town Square — an hour earlier than in previous editions to spare a stacked elite field the worst of the unseasonably warm Bohemian forecast. RunCzech's Gold Label race is the first major European marathon after a record-shattering London weekend, and organisers have built a pacing plan around a 2:04:59 men's course-record target that would finally break Eliud Kiptanui's stubborn 2:05:39 from 2010.
The men's elite field is led by Ethiopia's Andamlak Belihu, the 2024 Berlin third-placer who has run 2:04:18, and Kenya's Vincent Kipchumba, a former Vienna champion with a 2:04:23 personal best. Belihu told a pre-race media event in Wenceslas Square that he is targeting a 62:00/63:00 split with the help of Belgian pacemaker Bashir Abdi's training partner, Tim de Greef, who will take the lead group through halfway. The depth behind them is the deepest at Prague in a decade: eight men hold sub-2:06 personal bests, including Ethiopia's Berhanu Tsegu and Kenya's Eliud Kiptum-trained Bernard Koech, who said the cool overnight forecast had reset his expectations from "fast" to "potentially historic".
The women's race is centred on a duel between Ethiopia's Ababel Yeshaneh and Kenya's Magdalyne Masai. Yeshaneh, who arrived in Prague off the back of a 1:04:31 Ras Al Khaimah half-marathon in February, said her marathon goal for 2026 is to "take the championship races more seriously" and that Prague is the time-trial that justifies a Berlin autumn campaign. Masai, the Hannover champion two months ago, will run with Hellen Obiri's pacemaker Brian Lukomski, who has been instructed to bring the field through halfway in 67:30. Eight women in the field hold personal bests inside 2:22, the deepest women's elite section the race has ever assembled.
RunCzech is also using the 2026 weekend to debut a wave-start protocol for its mass-participation field of just over 11,000 runners. Following criticism of pinch-points along the cobbled approach to Charles Bridge in 2025, the start has been split into four colour-coded waves at 60-second intervals, and the previously notorious U-turn at the National Theatre has been re-routed into a wider loop on Smetanovo nábřeží. Organisers say the change has trimmed roughly 40 metres from the official course and that the new line has been re-certified by World Athletics, with both the men's and women's records reset to comparable standards. A 7,000-strong half-marathon field will follow on Saturday afternoon.
The Czech contingent will be led by 2024 Olympian Vít Pavlišta, who returns from a stress reaction with a conservative target of 2:09:30. The defending women's national champion Tereza Hrochová has chosen to skip Prague for a track build-up to the European Championships and will instead run the Karlovy Vary Half Marathon on 24 May. With Doha postponed and Keqiao locked in as the de facto Diamond League opener two weeks later, Prague gets a rare clear weekend in the European calendar — and, with a forecast of 12°C at the gun and a tail wind down Vltava embankment, conditions to match the field. Live coverage runs on RunCzech's YouTube channel and on Czech public broadcaster ČT Sport from 07:30 local time.