The 2026 Chicago Marathon by the Numbers

Amos Kipruto and Hawi Feysa won the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, both in the second-fastest winning time in the race’s history, and we have the full top 10s here. Behind them, 54,581 runners crossed the line in Grant Park on the unofficial results, the last of them at 9:23:55, more than seven hours after Kipruto. We went through every one of those finish times, along with a random sample of about 2,000 runners’ 5K splits, to see how the rest of the field got on.

More than 55,000 people were registered for the race, the most Chicago has ever had, and Sunday’s finisher count is 199 higher than the 54,382 that FindMyMarathon recorded last year, when organizers called the turnout a record.

How Fast the Field Ran

	All finishers	Men	Women
Finishers	54,581	29,378	24,990
Median time	4:22:38	4:04:11	4:42:27
Average time	4:30:04	4:14:24	4:48:23
Sub-3:00	3,353 (6.1%)	3,023	317
Sub-3:30	10,493 (19.2%)	7,954	2,498
Sub-4:00	20,543 (37.6%)	14,040	6,425
Sub-5:00	38,155 (69.9%)	22,829	15,195
6:00:00 or slower	5,507 (10.1%)	1,915	3,558

The median finisher ran 4:22:38, which works out to 10:01 per mile, and the average was a little slower at 4:30:04, pulled back by the long tail of runners out past six hours. A man in the middle of the men’s results ran 4:04:11, and the median woman finished in 4:42:27. Women made up 45.8 percent of finishers. Our guide to average marathon times has more on how those numbers compare with other races.

The busiest quarter-hour at the finish was the one right before four hours, when 5,516 runners came through, and plenty of them had an eye on the clock: 430 crossed between 3:59:00 and 3:59:59, against 277 in the minute after. Three hours pulled people in the same way, with 273 runners squeezing into the 2:59s and 175 landing in the 3:00s.

Finishers came from 160 countries. Some 32,169 of them were American, which leaves 41 percent from abroad, led by Mexico with 3,245, Britain with 2,414, Canada with 1,526 and Brazil with 1,491.

How Many Runners Qualified for Boston

Sunday’s race falls in the window for the 2028 Boston Marathon, which opened on Sept. 19 with the same qualifying standards as this year. In all, 7,247 finishers, or 13.3 percent, ran at or under the standard for their age group: 4,153 men (14.1 percent of the men), 3,058 women (12.2 percent) and 36 non-binary runners. FindMyMarathon put Chicago’s qualifying rate at 16.1 percent last year, on a day organizers described as ideal.

The cutoff for the 2027 race was 5:17, and 5,720 of Sunday’s qualifiers beat their time by at least that much, enough to have been safe this year. Another 1,535 runners missed by five minutes or less, 283 of them by a minute or less, which is the kind of margin our look at BQ pacing found is so often lost in the second half. These counts use each runner’s age group on Sunday, while Boston goes by age on its own race day, so anyone who moves up a group before April 2028 gets a slightly easier standard, and the real number of qualifiers will be a little higher.

Positive Splits and Negative Splits

Race morning started at the cooler end of the weekend forecast and warmed up quickly. At Midway Airport it was 60 F with a dew point of 53 F just before 8 a.m., 70 F by noon and 75 F by 2 p.m. The median runner in our split sample started at about 8:18 a.m., which put a typical finisher on the closing miles at around noon, as the temperature was climbing past 70 F.

Of the 54,227 finishers with a recorded half-marathon split, only 4,580, or 8.4 percent, ran the second half faster than the first. The median runner went through halfway in 2:01:56 and lost 13:52 over the second half, and one in five finishers (20.2 percent) was 30 minutes or more slower after 13.1 miles. Women held their pace a bit better than men, with 9.2 percent running a negative split against 7.8 percent of men, and a median fade of 13:29 against 14:14.

Finish time	Finishers	Negative split	Median second-half slowdown
Under 3:00:00	3,345	16.6%	2:45 (3.3%)
3:00:00 to 3:29:59	7,123	14.8%	4:55 (5.2%)
3:30:00 to 3:59:59	10,035	13.3%	7:36 (7.0%)
4:00:00 to 4:29:59	9,097	8.3%	13:11 (11.0%)
4:30:00 to 4:59:59	8,488	6.3%	18:14 (13.7%)
5:00:00 to 5:59:59	10,895	2.5%	26:51 (17.8%)
6:00:00 or slower	5,244	1.4%	32:35 (18.2%)

Sub-3:00 runners gave up a median of just 2:45 over the second half, and one in six of them split negative. Further back, between five and six hours, the typical runner lost almost 27 minutes and only 2.5 percent ran the back half quicker. Most of those runners had started in the later waves and were out on the course for the hottest part of the day.

Where the Field Slowed Down the Most

To see where the time went, we pulled the full 5K splits for a random sample of 2,042 finishers, whose median finish of 4:21:53 sits within a minute of the whole field’s.

Segment	Median pace (per mile)	Compared with the first 5K
Start to 5K	9:16	n/a
5K to 10K	9:10	0.7% faster
10K to 15K	9:09	0.7% faster
15K to 20K	9:21	0.9% slower
20K to 25K	9:36	3.1% slower
25K to 30K	10:09	7.7% slower
30K to 35K	10:43	13.1% slower
35K to 40K	11:20	19.3% slower
40K to finish	10:28	10.7% slower

Most runners were at their quickest between 5K and 15K, going through those 10 kilometers at about 9:10 per mile, and they held close to that until the halfway point. From 25K the pace dropped off steadily, and the stretch from 35K to 40K, roughly miles 22 to 25, from Chinatown down to 35th Street and back up Michigan Avenue through Bronzeville, was the slowest 5K of the day for 67.2 percent of the sample, at a median of 11:20 per mile. Another 14.5 percent had their worst 5K between 30K and 35K.

About 29 percent of the sample ran the 10K from 30K to 40K at least a quarter slower than their first-half pace, the kind of drop most runners would describe as hitting the wall. The last 2.2K, which takes in the short climb at Roosevelt Road that runners call Mount Roosevelt, went by at a median of 10:28 per mile, close to a minute quicker than the 5K before it, as plenty of runners found something for the finish. Our mile-by-mile guide to the course covers each of those stretches.

Finish Times by Age Group

Age group	Finishers	Median time
19 and under	302	4:54:37
20 to 24	3,750	4:24:06
25 to 29	10,118	4:22:29
30 to 34	9,319	4:18:39
35 to 39	7,889	4:14:49
40 to 44	7,339	4:15:55
45 to 49	5,826	4:19:39
50 to 54	4,319	4:25:56
55 to 59	2,899	4:37:07
60 to 64	1,722	4:47:33
65 to 69	712	4:55:35
70 to 74	242	5:24:33
75 to 79	65	5:52:28
80 and over	15	6:15:42

The 25 to 29 group was the biggest in the race by some distance, with 10,118 finishers, but it was not the fastest. That was the 35 to 39 group, with a median of 4:14:49, followed by the 40 to 44s at 4:15:55, both seven minutes or so quicker than the runners in their late 20s. Even the 45 to 49 group, at 4:19:39, ran a faster median than anyone under 30. At the other end, 2,756 finishers were 60 or older, and the 15 runners in the 80 and over category had a median of 6:15:42.

On our numbers, 5,808 finishers also ran fast enough under Chicago’s own qualifying standards to skip the drawing for the Oct. 10, 2027 race, and everyone else has until 2 p.m. Central on Oct. 29 to enter the drawing, with results due by email on Dec. 8.