London Is Getting a Marathon for Teams of Four, With All Four Running at Once

Team Marathon, a new event opening in East London on May 22, 2027, will let four runners share the marathon distance by sending all four out at once, each covering 6.55 miles (10.55K), and adding their four times into a single team result.

That is not how a marathon relay usually works. In a relay, one runner is on the course at a time and the team changes over at fixed points. Team Marathon has no baton and no waiting. The four start together on a short loop, run their own legs at their own pace, and the organizers add the legs up at the finish. The event’s website says: “Your team will start together, whether you run together is up to you.”

A pre-sale opens at 10 a.m. Wednesday through Let’s Do This at £26.20 (about $36) a person, or £104.80 (about $143) for a team of four. Places at that founding rate are limited, payment plans are offered, and no standard entry price has been given. Teams will run in waves through the afternoon around a race village, with DJs and a brass band on the course and cheer zones and food stalls beside it, and runners entering alone will be matched into a team. The organizers have named East London but not yet a venue.

Behind it is Benchmark, a sports events company founded and led by Nick Keller and certified as a B Corp, known in running for the Bloomberg Square Mile Relay. That event sends teams of 10 around a mile each through a city’s financial district, and entry is restricted to Bloomberg’s customers: at least eight runners per team must be verified Terminal users, the other two employees of the same client firm. Benchmark says it has held 86 editions since 2008, across 13 cities and four continents, and that upward of 100,000 people have taken part. Four are scheduled for 2026, starting in London on Sept. 17.

Keller said in the announcement that the company was “excited to be stepping out with something different, having seen first-hand how powerful a team-based running concept can be.” He added: “Shared experience will be at the heart of everything we do.”

Dividing a marathon between four people is not new in Britain. Edinburgh’s Hairy Haggis Team Relay has run for years in legs of 8.3, 5.5, 8 and 4.4 miles, costs £156 (about $213) a team, and sells out annually, according to its listing on Findarace. What Team Marathon alters is the simultaneity and the party around it. Its founding rate is about two thirds of the Edinburgh price.

The Hackney Half sold out its 2027 race within minutes of each release window, two days after this year’s edition, which drew a record 27,000 runners. It falls on May 16, six days before Team Marathon and in the same part of London. Ballot applications for the 2026 London Marathon reached 1,133,813, a rise of 36 percent in a year. Strava counted running clubs on its platform growing 3.5 times in 2025, and found Gen Z 75 percent likelier than Gen X to name a race or event as its main motivation for exercising.

The organizers say the event is built for the formal and informal running groups that have multiplied in big cities, and for younger runners who enter in company. They cite a January survey of 9,459 people across the U.K. and Ireland by the events agency Massive, which found that 80 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 enter events alongside friends.

Benchmark says three U.K. cities are planned for 2027, with Europe to follow.