MORE THAN A RACE: THE BERLIN MARATHON 

Published: 24/09/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

The Berlin Marathon is widely regarded as the fastest of the six Majors, the course where world records go to be broken. But the real story of this race isn't just the clock. It's a road that once belonged to half a city, and the morning it was handed back to everyone. 

Every September, the Tiergarten wakes up wearing a number. Before the sun has cleared the trees, the great green lung of the city fills with tens of thousands of runners in bin bags and borrowed hoodies, shuffling towards the start pens, queueing for toilets that will run out of paper by the time they reach the front, and squinting up at the Siegessäule, the golden Goddess of Victory glinting above it all like she knows something they don't. A drum band starts up somewhere. Someone begins a synchronised clap. Then the elites are away, the waves follow one by one, and tens of thousands of people set off through a city that has spent the better part of a century learning what a road can mean. 

If London is the party and Boston is the pilgrimage, Berlin is the stopwatch. Wide, flat, sweeping in its turns and short on excuses, it has earned its reputation as one of the world's fastest marathons, the place where records have been rewritten again and again. Runners come here to chase seconds, and nobody can blame them. But reduce Berlin to a time and you miss the best part of it. 

It started small, and a little bit silly. In October 1974, a pastry chef and middle-distance runner named Horst Milde staged the first Berliner Volksmarathon with 286 participants and a great deal of optimism. The winner was Günter Hallas, a postman from Spandau who had spotted a newspaper advert and thought, why not. He ran 2:44:53, largely ignoring the water and salt tablets on offer, mostly alone, on a course between Mommsenstadion and the Grunewald. There were no crowds and no bands. For the first seven editions the race stayed in the Grunewald forest, and it belonged only to the west, because the east was a place you couldn't run to. 

In 1981, Milde and his colleagues finally persuaded the authorities to let the marathon take to the city's streets. On 27 September, 3,486 runners from 30 nations stood on the great lawn in front of the Reichstag and set off into West Berlin. The finish was on Kurfürstendamm, and the route even passed through Kochstrasse near Checkpoint Charlie. An estimated 250,000 spectators lined the course. For the first time, Berlin's marathon belonged to the city rather than the forest.

In the years that followed, a few East German runners who had permission to visit family in the West slipped quietly into the race. One runner from Thüringen even registered under his cat's name. The organisers knew about some of them, but kept their identities secret because discovery by the Stasi could have had consequences. It was the sort of underground sporting rebellion that Berlin seemed uniquely capable of producing. 

Then came 30 September 1990. It rained, of course. Three days before official reunification, 25,000 people ran in the Vereinigungs-Marathon, a race that brought runners from east and west together on the same course. After just under 3.5 kilometres they passed through the Brandenburg Gate, a landmark that had stood behind a wall for nearly thirty years, guarded, barbed and out of reach. The race was held only days before German reunification on 3 October, and the symbolism needed very little explaining. 

The course still tells that story, kilometre by kilometre. You leave the Tiergarten and head into Mitte, stamp along Torstrasse into the old east, and hit alternative, unapologetic Friedrichshain around 10K before dropping south into Kreuzberg, whose alternative culture had flourished on the old West Berlin fringe and expanded after the Wall fell. At around 23K you pass Rathaus Schöneberg, where Kennedy told a crowd in 1963 that he was a Berliner, and where Willy Brandt spoke on the afternoon the Wall fell. Then it's the leafy southwest, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Philharmonie, and back towards the centre. It's a history syllabus with water stations. 

It isn't all goosebumps, mind you. The middle of Berlin is long, straight and quieter than you'd like, and the halfway mark passes with the sort of mental toughness that every marathon demands and none advertises. But the bands keep coming, brass and drums and oompah and rock, loud enough to pull your head back up. The aid stations have a Berlin quirk of their own: rigid plastic cups that can be awkward to pinch and drink from at speed. You either slow down, wear half of it, or carry your own. And somewhere along the way you'll pass spectators holding up boards telling you who won, especially if a record has fallen, which in Berlin is not an outlandish thing to hope for. 

Because the German capital has spent decades turning fast into something almost theatrical. Naoko Takahashi broke the women's two-hour-twenty barrier here in 2001 before Tigist Assefa added another extraordinary chapter in 2023 with 2:11:53.  

And, on the men’s side, Paul Tergat became the first man under 2:05 in 2003. Haile Gebrselassie came back in 2007 and 2008 and lowered the men's world record twice. Patrick Makau, Wilson Kipsang and Dennis Kimetto followed, each taking the men's mark lower, until Eliud Kipchoge brought it down to 2:01:39 in 2018 and then 2:01:09 in 2022.  

So, yes. The names change, the margins get smaller, but the setting barely does. Give the world's best runners a flat road through Berlin and, every few years, someone decides the previous limit wasn't really a limit at all. 

And that is what makes the ending so hard to forget. The last few kilometres twist and turn after all that straight road, the supporters press in, and every sore part of you starts to negotiate. Then you turn the final corner and there it is: the Brandenburg Gate, huge and magnificent, and the blue floor of the finish beyond it. You run through the gate with the line waiting just beyond. It's the same gate that once marked the end of the line, and now it's where the line finishes. 

Fast is what Berlin is famous for. Free is what Berlin means. 

Go and run through the gate. You’ll understand.