A Runner’s $5,748 Chicago Marathon Bill Shows the Real Cost of a Major

Hank, a running coach who posts on X as @HankFrank, sat down after the Chicago Marathon and added up everything the weekend had cost him, right down to the gels. The total came to $5,748.48. Since he shared the list on Oct. 14 it has been viewed 2.2 million times, and much of the reaction in the 300 replies has taken aim at the $1,199.99 Garmin on his wrist. The watch is only the most visible line on the bill. Getting to Chicago, sleeping there and moving around the city cost him more than all of his gear put together, while the race entry, at $266, made up just 4.6 percent of the total.

That split is the useful part of the post, because it gets to what has changed about running one of the World Marathon Majors. Going for a run still costs nothing, and most marathons still cost a few hundred dollars to enter. The seven Majors have become something closer to a travel product, priced the way any city prices a weekend when tens of thousands of visitors all want the same hotel rooms.

What Was on the Bill

Hank split his list into three parts. Race-day gear came to $2,436.98: the watch, a pair of Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses at $499, a $295 SOAR racing singlet, ASICS racing shoes at $269.99 and a few smaller items. His fueling added only $41.19. The weekend itself, everything from flights to the carb load, accounted for the remaining $3,270.31.

Most of that gear will be worn again, which several of his replies pointed out, and the $1,593.60 in flights covered two people, not one. Strip the trip down to the costs that only exist because of the race, though, and it still comes to $2,766.80 for flights, three nights in an Airbnb at $970.25, $195.45 in Uber and Lyft rides and $7.50 on public transit. That is 48 percent of everything he listed, against 42 percent for the gear.

“You can judge me for the $1,200 watch, but I’ll defend the $94.95 race photos every single time,” he wrote, before adding: “Running is free, though.”

The Entry Fee Has Outpaced Inflation

Chicago charges U.S. residents $250 to enter and everyone else $260, plus a processing fee, which explains the $266 on Hank’s list. The fee is unchanged for the 2027 race, but it has climbed a long way over two decades. In 2008 the race cost $110, according to a table of Major entry fees compiled by Stride Nation in 2012. Adjusted with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index, that $110 is worth about $172 today, so the current fee is roughly 45 percent above where inflation alone would have taken it.

The price of a charity place has risen faster. A runner taking one of Chicago’s charity spots for 2027 has to raise at least $2,500, up from $2,200 for 2026, and pays a $325 charity entry fee on top ($335 from outside the U.S.), according to the race’s application page. About a third of this year’s field was expected to run for a charity, the race said in December.

At several of the other Majors, a runner from abroad pays more than a local just to enter. The London Marathon charges U.K. runners £79.99 ($106) if they win a ballot place and international runners £275 ($365), a fee that includes a carbon offset for their travel. Tokyo charges ¥19,800 ($125) to domestic runners and $230 to overseas entrants, according to the race’s 2027 guidelines. Berlin has a single fee, which rose to €215 ($241) for 2027 from €205.

Hotel Rates Climb on Race Weekend

The rest of the bill is set by the host city’s hotels and airlines, and they price marathon weekend accordingly. Ahead of this year’s race, travel technology company Amadeus reported that Chicago hotels were 85.9 percent booked for the Friday to Sunday of marathon weekend at an average daily rate of $364, 10.2 percent higher than at the same point a year earlier. Across all of 2025, Chicago hotels took in $2.9 billion over 11.9 million room nights, according to Choose Chicago, the city’s tourism agency. That works out to about $244 a night, so a room on race weekend was costing visitors around 50 percent more than the city’s yearly average.

Hank’s Airbnb, at about $323 a night, came in under those hotel rates. New York is following the same pattern ahead of its race next month: Amadeus had the average daily rate for marathon weekend at $369, up 12.4 percent on last year. Flights are getting busier too: Amadeus projected domestic air travel up 13 percent for Chicago’s race week and 45 percent for New York’s.

Almost everyone in a Major field is paying those prices. More than 75 percent of the 2025 Chicago Marathon’s participants traveled from outside Illinois, according to an economic impact study by Jones & Associates Economics. This year, about 41 percent of the race’s 54,581 finishers came from outside the U.S., and the field represented 160 countries. For a runner flying in from Mexico City, London or São Paulo, the $260 entry is small change next to the price of the flight.

A pair of running shoes and a local marathon still get most runners to a start line for a few hundred dollars, and Hank’s own list shows how much of his spending was optional. The Majors are a different purchase. A record 55,000-plus runners signed up for Chicago this year knowing what the weekend would cost, and applications for the 2027 drawing, at the same $250 entry fee, are open until 2 p.m. Central on Oct. 29.