How long is a marathon?

Maybe a friend just finished one, or a race email landed in your inbox and you didn't delete it straight away. Either way, you want to know how far is a marathon, really, and what it would ask of you. The short answer is 26.2 miles, which is more than four 10Ks back to back. The longer answer covers where that oddly precise number came from and how long people actually take to cover it.

A lot of runners assume a marathon is for a certain type of person. The data say otherwise. In the U.S. results below, half of all finishers took longer than four hours and 25 minutes, and the age groups run all the way up to 65 and over. What gets most people to the start line is four months of showing up for long runs that have to fit around work and family.

This page covers how many miles a marathon is, why the marathon distance is so specific, how far you really run, the average time to finish by age and sex, whether 7 hours is slow, who has run it in under 2 hours, and how a marathon differs from a half. It ends with training time, calories and steps.

How Many Miles Is a Marathon?

A marathon is 26.2 miles, or 26.219 if you want it exact. In kilometers it's 42.195, which is 26 miles and 385 yards in the old imperial measure. That's 46,145 yards, about 138,435 feet, or 105.5 laps of a 400-meter track. The marathon distance is identical everywhere, from the Olympic marathon to the smallest certified race, so a marathon in Boston, Berlin or your hometown is the same 42.195 kilometers.

For scale, a marathon is about 4.2 times the length of a 10K and exactly twice a half marathon. Our pages on how many miles a 10K is and how many miles a half marathon is cover those distances in detail.

Why Is a Marathon Length So Specific?

Because it copies one particular course from 1908. The race takes its name from the Greek legend of a messenger, usually called Pheidippides, who ran from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens to announce a victory over the Persians. When the first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896, organizers created a race of about 40 kilometers to celebrate ancient Greece, according to World Athletics. Early Olympic marathons varied in length, most of them around 40 kilometers.

The precise number comes from the 1908 London Olympics. The course started on the East Lawn at Windsor Castle and ran to the new White City Stadium, finishing on the track in front of the Royal Box. That made it about 26 miles to the stadium plus 385 yards inside it. Nothing about 26 miles and 385 yards was special in itself. It was simply the length of that course. But the 1908 race became famous, and in 1921 the sport's governing body made 42.195 kilometers the official marathon distance. It has been the standard ever since.

How Far Is a Marathon?

On paper, a marathon is 26.2 miles. In practice you'll run a little more, and the reason is how courses are measured. Under the rules in The Measurement of Road Race Courses, the manual that World Athletics and the race organizers' association AIMS publish, a course is measured along the shortest possible route a runner could take without being disqualified. The course can't be shorter than the official distance, and the measurement must be accurate to within 0.1 percent, which is 42 meters over a marathon.

To make sure a course is never short, measurers also add a safety margin called the short course prevention factor. Each kilometer is laid out as 1,001 meters, so a certified marathon measures about 42.237 kilometers along that shortest line. Almost nobody runs the shortest line. You drift wide on corners, cross the road for water and weave around other runners, so most finishers cover a bit more than 26.2 miles. Our half marathon page has field data on how far long GPS watches read.

Anything longer than a marathon is an ultramarathon. A marathon and a half is about 39.3 miles, or 63.3 kilometers, and the shortest common ultra is the 50K at 31.1 miles.

What Is the Average Time to Finish a Marathon?

In the United States, about 4 hours 25 minutes puts you in the middle of the field. Brian Rock of Running with Rock analyzed about 400,000 finishers of 2024 U.S. marathons with more than 200 finishers each, counting every runner once with their best time. The median was 4:25:33, a pace of about 10:08 per mile, with 4:14 for men and 4:41 for women. A second dataset agrees. In 10.5 million U.S. marathon results from 1984 to 2025 compiled by RunRepeat, with elite runners left out, the 2024 average was 4:34, with men at 4:24 and women at 4:51. Averages usually run slower than medians, because a few very slow finishes pull an average up.

Why so many runners finish just under 4 hours

Marathon times don't spread out smoothly. In 9,789,093 marathon finishing times, Allen and colleagues (2017) found finishes bunched just under round numbers, with the four-hour mark the clearest example. The runners weren't simply lucky. They sped up near the end when a round number was in reach, and the authors found that rewards such as qualifying times or pacers didn't explain it. A goal like sub-4 really does change how people run the last few miles.

Marathon pace chart

If you have a finish time in mind, this is the pace it takes:

Even paces over 42.195 kilometers (26.219 miles), rounded to the nearest second.

Marathon Finish Times by Age and Sex

Two openly published datasets break the numbers down. Running with Rock reports medians, the time half the finishers in a group beat, for men and women at several key ages. The middle 50 percent runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile, so it shows where most runners in that group finish:

Every row above is a median or a middle-50-percent range from Running with Rock's analysis of about 400,000 finishers of 2024 U.S. marathons, each runner counted once with their best time (Brian Rock, February 2025).

RunRepeat reports averages by age for men and women together:

Every row above is a 2024 average for men and women combined from RunRepeat's State of US Marathons 2025, which covers 10,482,628 U.S. results with elite runners excluded (Jens Jakob Andersen, August 2025).

The striking part is how little age costs before the 50s. RunRepeat's averages rose by just 2 minutes from ages 25 to 34 to ages 35 to 44, and by 11 minutes by ages 45 to 54. In Running with Rock's data the fastest men's group was 35 to 39, and the article describes times rising only slowly through the 40s. That matches German data on 300,757 marathon and half marathon runners, in which Leyk and colleagues (2007) found mean times virtually identical from age 20 to 49 and slowing only 2.6 to 4.4 percent per decade from 50 to 69. The change grows later on. Among men, the median at 60 to 64 was about 37 minutes slower than at 20 to 39, and among women about 43 minutes slower.

The women's median of 4:41 was about 11 percent behind the men's 4:14, and RunRepeat's averages show a gap of about 10 percent, close to the 10 percent in Leyk's marathon data. That's a smaller gap than in shorter races. In the Oslo 10K data on our 10K page, women averaged 15 to 20 percent slower than men of the same age. Women made up about 41 percent of U.S. marathoners in 2024, according to RunRepeat.

Who slows down in the second half

Almost everyone runs the second half of a marathon slower than the first. How much slower depends partly on sex. In 91,929 performances from 14 U.S. marathons in 2011, Deaner and colleagues (2015) found men ran the second half 15.6 percent slower than the first on average and women 11.7 percent slower. Men were about three times as likely as women to slow by more than 30 percent. That held even after the authors accounted for age, experience, finishing time and differences in aerobic capacity. The practical lesson for everyone is to start slower than you feel like starting, because the first 10 miles of a marathon usually feel easy.

Is 7 Hours Slow for a Marathon?

Seven hours is slow for running and a respectable time for walking. Covering 26.2 miles in 7 hours means averaging 16 minutes per mile, or about 3.75 mph, which is a brisk walk. Even RunRepeat's slowest age group, runners 65 and over, averaged 5 hours 35 minutes in 2024, so a 7-hour finish is well behind the typical runner of any age. That says nothing bad about the person who did it. Walking a marathon in 7 hours takes real fitness, and for some people walking is the most realistic way to finish a first marathon.

The practical question is the time limit. Some marathons keep the course open well past 7 hours and some close it sooner, so check yours before you enter. A walker who can hold 3.75 mph finishes in 7 hours, and one who can hold 4 mph in about 6.5.

How long does it take to walk a marathon?

Walking a marathon takes about 6.5 to 9 hours for most adults. Healthy adults under 60 walk at about 2.9 to 3.2 mph when they're not trying to hurry, according to a meta-analysis by Bohannon and Andrews (2011). Over 26.2 miles, the speed you can hold makes a big difference:

• 4 mph (fast walk): about 6 hours 33 minutes.
• 3.5 mph (brisk walk): about 7 hours 29 minutes.
• 3 mph (ordinary walk): about 8 hours 44 minutes.
• 2.5 mph (easy stroll): about 10 hours 29 minutes.

Can Someone Run 26 Miles in 2 Hours?

Yes, and it finally happened in a race that counts. At the London Marathon on April 26, 2026, Kenya's Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30, the first sub-two-hour marathon in a record-eligible race, and Ethiopia's Yomif Kejelcha finished just behind him in 1:59:41. World Athletics ratified Sawe's time as the world record that summer. In the same race, Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia set the women-only world record of 2:15:41.

To put 1:59:30 in perspective, it's an average of about 4:33 per mile for 26.2 miles, faster than many fit recreational runners can hold for a single mile. Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but that was a specially staged event with rotating pacers, so it never counted as a record.

What Is the Difference Between a Half Marathon and a Marathon?

A marathon is twice as long as a half marathon, but for most people it's much more than twice as hard. The clearest sign is in race-time prediction. In 2,303 recreational runners, Vickers and Vertosick (2016) found the classic Riegel formula (1981) predicted times well up to the half marathon. At the full marathon it was too optimistic, predicting a time at least 10 minutes too fast for half of the runners. By that formula a 2-hour half points to a marathon of about 4:10, so a first-timer with that half is safer planning on 4:20 or slower.

The extra difficulty comes from fuel and fatigue. Past about 20 miles, many runners run low on stored carbohydrate and slow sharply, the experience runners call hitting the wall, and our guide on how to train for a marathon covers why it happens and how fueling helps. A marathon also takes longer to train for, roughly four to five months against about three for a half, and longer to recover from. Our article on how long it takes to recover from a marathon covers the weeks after the race.

How Long Does It Take to Train for a Marathon?

Most people need about four to five months of marathon training once they can comfortably run 15 to 20 miles a week, and six months to a year if they're starting from less. Most of that time goes into slowly building the weekly long run, because legs adapt more slowly than lungs. The marathon training guide lays out the plan phase by phase, so this page won't repeat it.

How Many Calories and Steps Does a Marathon Take?

A marathon burns roughly 2,300 to 3,800 calories for a runner weighing 120 to 200 pounds. As with shorter races, body weight decides most of it and pace changes it very little. Wilkin and colleagues (2012) measured the cost in the lab, and it comes to roughly 0.73 calories per pound of body weight for every mile run and about 0.57 for every mile walked. Our article on how many calories a mile burns explains the method.

Gross calories over the full 26.2 miles at the per-mile rates above, rounded to the nearest 10. They include what you'd burn at rest over the same hours.

In steps, a marathon is about 38,000 to 46,000 for a recreational runner finishing in 4 to 5 hours, based on newer runners' measured rate of about 154 to 160 steps a minute. Walkers take about 51,000 to 60,000 steps, depending on speed. The step-rate studies behind those numbers, and walking speeds for every age group, are on our 5K page.

What This Means for You

Keep the essentials short: 26.2 miles, 42.195 kilometers, about 4:14 for the median American man and 4:41 for the median woman, and 6.5 to 9 hours for a walker. Use the tables above as landmarks, and remember that half of all American finishers took longer than about 4 hours 25 minutes, and every one of them still crossed the finish line. If you're new to distance running, a half marathon first is the sensible stepping stone.

The marathon itself is one morning. What decides it is the 16 to 20 weeks before, and that's where most first attempts quietly fall apart. A missed long run turns into a missed week, and the plan becomes something you avoid looking at. That's a consistency problem, and it's easier to solve with a routine that pulls you back than with more willpower. As Matt put it: "The real win is I actually want to work out now. That's never happened before."

The strength and mobility sessions in a marathon plan are the first to get dropped when the mileage climbs, so they're worth handing to a workout app designed to keep you motivated. FitCraft's 3D AI coaches demonstrate each dumbbell and bodyweight exercise and lead mobility and yoga sessions, your coach says your name during the workout, and programs and streaks keep those sessions on the calendar.