NASCAR Champion Kyle Larson Will Run His First Marathon in December

Kyle Larson won his third NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday, and in less than a month he will line up for his first marathon. The 34-year-old Hendrick Motorsports driver is running the California International Marathon on Dec. 6 and wants to finish in under 3:30, he said in Miami ahead of the NASCAR Awards, according to the NASCAR Wire Service.

“What brought it about … I’ve never been into running, and running frustrated me, but I had a couple of friends getting into it and just tried to commit myself to it,” Larson said. Those friends will be running with him, on a course that finishes at the State Capitol in Sacramento, his hometown.

“Once your body stops hurting all the time, and you learn to enjoy it and enjoy the process when you’re training, you want to go compete in a race,” he said. “For me, getting to compete in Sacramento, where I was born and raised, is special, and to get to do it with my friends is going to be fun.”

The furthest he has gone in training is 16 miles: 12 easy miles at around 9:00 per mile, then four at what he considers marathon pace, somewhere between 7:30 and 7:40 per mile in good weather. Held for the full 26.2 miles, that pace would bring him home in 3:16:38 to 3:21:01, between nine and 13 minutes inside his target. A 3:30 marathon asks for just a little over 8:00 per mile, which gives him some room if the second half turns hard, and Larson seems to expect that it will. “It wasn’t too bad, but doing that pace for three-and-a-half hours is going to be challenging,” he said. (Anyone who wants to set his numbers against their own can run them through our marathon pace calculator.)

CIM is a kind course for a debut. It runs point to point from near Folsom Dam into downtown Sacramento with a net elevation drop of 366 feet, and the route has not changed in 42 years, according to the race, which bills itself as a top Boston qualifier with more than 32 percent of finishers getting under their standard. It registers about 10,000 runners a year, and the field is set to double in 2027. The ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter ran 2:38:55 there last December.

Sunday’s title at Homestead-Miami Speedway made Larson NASCAR’s first back-to-back champion since Jimmie Johnson in 2010, the Associated Press reported, and Johnson has been down this road before. The seven-time champion ran 3:09:07 at the 2019 Boston Marathon, and Matt Kenseth went quicker still at Boston in 2022, running 3:01:40 at age 50. Running is now part of the job for plenty of drivers in the garage, too: a Chevrolet-backed fitness program wants its drivers under six minutes for the mile, and Larson drives the No. 5 Chevrolet. If he gets under 3:30, he will be in good company on our list of famous names with marathon times.

Dirt racing has usually filled Larson’s winters, and it will still have a place in this one. Once CIM is done, he is due at the Tulsa Shootout before the end of December, and then at the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals in January.