We are ecstatic that we can bring the 9th Annual Asheville Marathon & Half to our community of endurance runners this year. Although the half marathon race will be relocated for one year only to downtown Asheville, we expect that our awesome community of runners will continue to make this race such a memorable event even this year.  For 2021, we will offer a Special Edition half marathon race only. The 13.1 mile route showcases some of the BEST of the downtown Asheville city streets, River Arts District, greenways, parks and the French Broad River areas. To top it all off, this city-scenic course is one of the flattest half marathons to ever be run in Asheville downtown areas. Runners are going to just love the new greenway section along the French Broad River in the River Arts District. What a treat! Now that we have the conditional permit in hand, we opened up registration last week with limited spots left available. 

Adding the new Jump off Rock Half Marathon & 10k to the schedule has been a joyful and fun project. We have had such a blast working with the City of Hendersonville, Town of Laurel Park, and the YMCA of Hendersonville on this Inaugural race. The half marathon is going to be one of the fastest downhill half marathons in the south… with a net elevation loss over the course of 13.1 miles, we are fairly certain that runners will get a PERSONAL BEST at this race. The 10k is going to be awesome too! Although the 10k isn’t a downhill race, it is mostly flat with a couple of rollers through the downtown Hendersonville City streets around Lake Osceola and it will finish downtown on Historic Main Street with the half marathon. Registration opens today at 3pm for this new set of races! Limited entries, wave starts and point-to-point races. 

Since we have three half marathons in 2021 *YAY*, we are looking to add a ‘challenge’ for runners to complete all three of the half races, either in person or virtually, and then get an awesome commemorative medal. We are brainstorming names for the new challenge. So if you have some ideas, head over to our Instagram page and leave a comment, we have a swag bag full of goodies for whoever’s ‘challenge’ name we pick!

We are continuing to finalize permits for races and are only opening online registration when we have those, that is why you see some online registrations opening up only weeks before races are happening. So keep saving the dates for our races listed below and checking our schedule for new events that are going to pop up this year. We have removed events from our 2021 schedule that we know will not happen this year because participants safety would be compromised. 

Finally, we continue to strive to keep all our community members, runners, volunteers, staff and spectators safe at our events through this pandemic. It is very important to us to be able to provide these safe, in-person event opportunities for our community to look forward to and train for even during a pandemic. Through this year, we will not let up and will continue providing social-distanced, wave start events with strict safety protocols in place throughout the events. This means lower participation numbers, separate start and finish areas, temperature and COVID screenings and more. To find out all our safety guidelines and what is being implemented for a particular race, check out the race website.

We thank all of you that have attended our events over the past eight months for such positive attitudes and for adhering to all the safety protocols we have put in place for our events.. If you get a free minute, leave us a quick Google review about your experience running in a socially-distanced race with us since the pandemic started. We would really appreciate it! You can do that here: Write a Google Review.

Keep moving friends,