What a Marathon Race Director Actually Does: The Year Before Race Day

Race morning is the last day of a year-long job. Here is what a marathon race director does before the start gun: permits, a course measured by bicycle, a medical plan, and the call to cancel.

On race morning you see a start line, a banner and a crowd. What you don't see is the year of decisions that put them there, and the one person accountable for all of them.

That person is the race director. The job covers:

• the right to close a city's roads
• a course measured to the centimetre with a bicycle
• a medical plan built around the real odds of a cardiac arrest
• water for tens of thousands of people, and a way to clear their cups
• the hardest decision in the sport: whether to cancel

This guide walks through that year using what the people who run the world's biggest marathons have said and published: their rulebooks, their medical studies and their race-day numbers.

Key takeaways

• Big-city marathons are planned all year. Chicago files its permits and street-closure requests at the start of every year, and Berlin sets its budget and entry fees about 15 months out.
• The course is measured with a calibrated bicycle along the shortest possible line, then deliberately laid about 42 metres long so it can never be found short.
• Cardiac arrest during a marathon is rare: roughly 1 in 170,000 finishers. Better emergency planning has helped cut the share of those arrests that prove fatal from 71% to 34%.
• The race director also owns the call nobody wants: stopping or cancelling a race for heat, storms or safety.

What a race director is (and isn't)

A race director is the person with final responsibility for a race: its planning, its execution and its safety.

A 2026 US government job posting for the Air Force Marathon puts it plainly. The race director is the event's primary point of authority, in charge of road-closure permits and of recruiting and training about 2,000 course volunteers (USAJOBS).

England Athletics' handbook for race directors lists what the role owns (England Athletics RunEvents):

• the race licence
• course design and measurement
• the budget and the event plan
• contracts and sponsors
• health and safety, including risk assessments
• volunteer instructions
• letters to local residents and businesses

At the biggest races the job is a team effort, with the race director as its conductor. Dave McGillivray, then race director of the Boston Marathon, described himself that way in 2017. He said the Boston Athletic Association's staff of about 25 handled most of the planning, while his focus was race day itself (Boston Globe).

Berlin shows how deep that structure goes. Its organiser describes around 6,500 volunteers organised under:

• 58 department heads
• 45 course-section leaders
• 30 aid-station leads

(SCC EVENTS)

The race director is also not the owner or the title sponsor. Who owns a race and who pays for its name is its own story, and it's the subject of a later article in this series.

The timeline: a year you never see

Every race is different, but the big-city pattern looks like this:

In New York the coordination with the city never stops. Race director Ted Metellus has said the better question is which city agencies aren't involved (amNY).

Job 1: Get permission to close a city

A marathon borrows a city's streets, and that permission has a price, a paper trail and a deadline. Washington, D.C.'s 2025 planning guide shows what a city asks for (D.C. guide):

• A letter of intent at least 180 days before any event that needs street closures.
• A traffic control plan at least 30 days out.
• General liability insurance of $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate, naming the city.
• One portable toilet for every 300 people.
• The organiser pays for all police coverage, listed at $71.52 per officer per hour, and supplies every barrier.

Philadelphia asks for a standard application at least 90 days ahead and $1 million of insurance, and requires emergency medical cover for any race (City of Philadelphia).

At the largest races the numbers get enormous:

• Boston 2026: more than 65 local, state and federal agencies coordinated from the state emergency management centre, for a course running through eight cities and towns (NBC Boston).
• Chicago: the course streets close from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the Chicago Police Department closes and reopens them (Chicago Marathon).
• London 2026: roads closed from 07:00, and drivers could cross the route only at 21 marshalled crossing points (London Marathon Events).
• Berlin: about 5,300 barrier sections, nearly 14 km of fencing (SCC EVENTS), and more than 800 police officers on duty in 2025 (Berlin.de).

For its top-tier "Label" races, World Athletics requires the whole course to be closed to traffic until the cut-off time, with police or traffic controllers at every intersection (World Athletics Label Road Race Regulations).

The paperwork that makes it legal: sanction, licence, insurance

In the US, a race can apply for a sanction from USA Track & Field (USATF), which is its official approval of the event and comes with liability insurance. USATF advises getting sanctioned before registration opens and no later than 30 days out (USATF).

In England, a licensed race is covered by up to £50 million of public liability insurance. You can't apply less than 28 days before the event, and an independent adjudicator checks the race against the licence standards (England Athletics). When roads are closed, organisers are often asked to show £10–30 million of cover (RunEvents handbook).

The job even has formal training. The RRCA's Race Director Certification takes 10+ hours and costs $280, and you have to score at least 85% on a 100-question exam. Its modules include municipal relations, legal and insurance risk, managing volunteers, and a section called "Before Next Year" (RRCA).

Job 2: Build a course that is exactly 42.195 km (plus 42 metres)

This is the most precise part of the job, and the one runners know least about.

The bicycle that measures the world's marathons

World Athletics accepts one method for measuring a road course: a calibrated bicycle with a mechanical counter on the front hub. The counter doesn't measure distance. It counts wheel revolutions, at about 9 cm of road per count (World Athletics/AIMS measurement manual, 2023).

It is still called the Jones Counter, after Alan Jones. His first road race was advertised as 20 km; he later measured it at about 11.4 miles, well short of the 12.4 it should have been. So he built a better way to measure (Alan Jones, "History of the Jones Counter").

By 1984, all 13 volunteers who measured the Los Angeles Olympic marathon course used his counter (same source).

How the measurement actually works

1. Calibrate. The measurer lays out a straight, level calibration course of at least 300 m, steel-taped at least twice. They ride it four times just before measuring and four times after. Tyres slowly lose air, so calibration and measurement must happen within 24 hours (manual).
2. Ride the shortest possible route. The course is measured along the tightest line a runner could legally take, 30 cm from the kerb, cutting every corner and crossing diagonally between bends. The path most runners actually take is irrelevant (World Athletics rules, TR 55.3; manual).
3. Add the safety margin. Every kilometre is laid out as 1,001 metres. This "short course prevention factor" covers the bicycle method's error of about one part in a thousand. On a marathon it adds roughly 42 metres, so the course can never be re-measured and found short (TR 55.3).
4. Account for every cone. Turnarounds are calculated too. A single cone adds about 1.25 m. Moving a turnaround point changes the race distance by twice the move (manual).

Only accredited measurers do this for international races. World Athletics and AIMS recognise Grade A and Grade B measurers, and there were 220 of them in 2023 (manual).

Certificates don't last forever:

• A World Athletics/AIMS certificate is valid for 5 years (TR 55.3).
• A USATF certification expires after 10 years (USATF).

The race director's side of the job is practical. The guidelines tell organisers to:

• leave 20–50 m of slack per 10 km between the planned and measured routes
• arrange traffic protection, because the measurer rides diagonally across roads
• expect roughly 8–10 km of measuring per hour, plus up to 1.5 hours of calibration

The certificate itself is free, but measurers' fees vary (manual).

Why your watch says you ran 42.5 km

GPS isn't allowed for certification because it reads long. Even mounted on the measuring bike, riding the exact line, a GPS device typically over-reads by 4–6 metres per kilometre (manual). Over a marathon that's roughly 170–250 m.

Add the 42 m safety margin, then every corner you didn't cut and every time you weaved around another runner. A watch reading well over 42.2 km is normal. It doesn't mean the course was long.

Why Boston times can't be world records

Two rules keep road records fair (World Athletics rules, CR 31.21):

• the start and finish can be no more than 50% of the race distance apart in a straight line, so a tailwind can't help the whole way
• the course can drop no more than 1 metre per kilometre, which is 42 m over a marathon

Boston's point-to-point course drops about 140 m (459 ft), more than three times the limit (Boston.com). That's why Geoffrey Mutai's 2:03:02 in 2011, 57 seconds under the world record of the day, was never ratified (World Athletics).

Records also need proof after the fact. The course must be re-measured by a different Grade A measurer, as late as possible before the race or soon after it (CR 31.21.5).

History shows why. Alberto Salazar's 2:08:13 in New York in 1981 was once hailed as a world best. It was later ruled invalid when re-measurement found the course short (World Athletics).

Job 3: Plan for the worst moment of someone's life

Medical planning starts early and never really ends.

• World Athletics advises appointing a race medical director at the earliest stage and involving them in final course decisions (World Athletics Competition Medical Guidelines).
• The RRCA calls choosing a medical director one of the first planning decisions, and says on-site medical care is mandatory at a race of any size (RRCA Safe Event Guidelines).

The numbers every race director plans around

Cardiac arrest is rare, and survival is now mostly a matter of planning.

• A study of US marathons and half marathons from 2000 to 2010 found 59 cardiac arrests among 10.9 million runners, 0.54 per 100,000. 71% of them were fatal (Kim et al., NEJM 2012).
• The same group then looked at 2010–2023: 176 arrests among 29.3 million finishers. The rate was essentially unchanged at 0.60 per 100,000, but case fatality fell to 34% and survival rose to 66%. That is comparable to airports and casinos with public defibrillators (Kim et al., JAMA 2025).
• In the earlier study, every survivor with complete data had received bystander CPR (NEJM 2012). The researchers credit emergency action plans built around immediate CPR and defibrillation, which are exactly the plans race directors and their medical teams put in place (JAMA 2025).
• The RRCA's rule of thumb is that a cardiac patient needs advanced life support within 4–6 minutes, and races should plan for two emergencies at once (RRCA).

Too much water is a danger too. At the 2002 Boston Marathon, 13% of sampled finishers had low blood sodium (hyponatremia), and 0.6% had critically low levels. The biggest risk factors were gaining weight during the race, which means drinking more than you sweat, and finishing slower than four hours (Almond et al., NEJM 2005). Good aid-station design isn't "more water everywhere."

Most care is minor, but there's a lot of it.

• Over 12 years, the Twin Cities Marathon recorded 18.9 finish-area medical encounters per 1,000 entrants. 90% of them were mild, and more than 99.9% of finishers left without hospital care (Roberts, 2000).
• At Chicago, patients in the course medical tents rose steadily mile by mile until about mile 20 (Parker et al., 2021), and as many runners needed care out on the course as at the finish (Chan et al., 2019).

What that looks like on race day

World Athletics' medical guidelines suggest, for every 1,000 runners (guidelines):

• 2–3 physicians
• 4–6 nurses
• 4–6 EMTs, paramedics or athletic trainers

They also call for minor medical stations at least every 3 km, defibrillators along the whole course, and cold-water immersion for heat stroke.

Real races:

• Chicago lists 1,500+ medical personnel and medical support at 22 points on the course, with a tent at every aid station (Chicago Marathon).
• Boston 2024 used 1,900 medical volunteers across 30 medical stations (B.A.A.).
• New York's medical operation runs more than 70 ambulances, according to its medical director (NYRR).

Heat: the flag system

Most big races now run a colour-coded alert system based on the wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT). It's a heat measure that combines temperature, humidity, sun and wind.

Chicago's Event Alert System runs from green (low risk) through yellow and red to black. Black means the event is cancelled or stopped (Chicago Marathon). Twin Cities adds a white flag for the opposite danger: hypothermia in cold, wet weather (Twin Cities in Motion).

The thresholds differ by body, which is itself worth knowing:

Sources: World Athletics, RRCA, Roberts, 2010.

Job 4: Design race day, minute by minute

Water, toilets and the rule behind them

World Athletics requires water at the start and finish and about every 5 km on the course (TR 55.8). The big races go well beyond that:

• Chicago: 20 aid stations about 1–2 miles apart, each laid out in the same order: a medical tent, then toilets, Gatorade, a PA announcer and water (Chicago Marathon).
• Boston: water and Gatorade at every mile from mile 2 (B.A.A.).
• Berlin: 15 refreshment points (BMW Berlin Marathon).
• London 2026: toilets at every mile from 1 to 24, and water every three miles to mile 12, then every two (London Marathon event guide).

Chicago, by the numbers (from the race's 2025 media guide):

Waves, timing and cut-offs

Start waves stop the course from jamming.

• Boston went from four waves of 7,500 runners to six smaller waves in 2026, without changing the field size, to ease bus loading and flow along the course (B.A.A.).
• London sends its waves off over about two hours, with gaps so the course ahead can clear (event guide).

Timing uses a chip on your bib, read by mats. Chicago places mats at the start, every 5 km, halfway, each mile from 20 to 25, mile 25.2 and the finish (Chicago Marathon).

Under World Athletics rules, the official time is gun time. Your start-line-to-finish "chip time" can be given to you, but it isn't official (World Athletics rules, TR 19).

Cut-offs exist because the roads have to reopen:

Job 5: Make the call nobody wants to make

Everything above assumes the race goes ahead. Sometimes the race director has to decide it can't.

• Chicago, 2007. On a record hot day of 89°F with 73% humidity, the race was halted for the first time in its history, about 3.5 hours after the start. Runners were rerouted and told to stop running. Of 36,867 starters, 25,534 officially finished (Chicago Marathon media guide).
• New York, 2012. The race was cancelled on the Friday before race day as the city recovered from Hurricane Sandy. It was the first cancellation in its history (ABC News).
• Twin Cities, 2023. The race was cancelled less than two hours before the first start, as the heat forecast hit black-flag levels (MPR News). The race later decided to move from early to mid-October from 2027, citing that cancellation and the heat readings since (Twin Cities in Motion).

How those calls are actually made, with what information and under what pressure, is the subject of our next article.

Job 6: After the finish line

When the last runner crosses the line, another job begins:

• Clothes. Runners shed layers at the start, and the races collect and donate them:
  • New York collected 123,000 lb in 2025
  • Chicago collected 54,500 lb in 2024
  • Boston donated more than 20 tons of clothing and 600 pairs of sneakers in 2024

  (NYRR via RRM; Chicago media guide; B.A.A.)

• Cups. New York composts all of its water and Gatorade cups: 107.99 tons of material in 2025 (NYRR via RRM).
• Data. Medical directors at World Athletics Label races must share anonymised medical data (Label regulations), and a record needs its course verified.
• Next year. The cycle starts again almost immediately.

Why race directors matter

A well-run marathon does far more than stage a race.

Sources: Bank of America (Chicago impact), Bank of America (Chicago charity), NYRR via RRM (impact), NYRR via RRM (charity), B.A.A. (impact), B.A.A. (charity), London Marathon Events (impact), London Marathon Events (charity).

The largest single-day races are still growing. New York set the record for most marathon finishers in 2025 with 59,226, and London took it back in April 2026 with 59,830 (NYRR via RRM; London Marathon Events). For 2027 only, London will become a two-day event for 100,000 runners (London Marathon Events).

Behind every one of those numbers is a race director who got the permits, measured the course, staffed the medical tents and made the calls.

How to tell a race is well directed: a runner's checklist

You can't see a race director's year, but you can see its results. Before you enter a race, check:

1. Is the course certified, and is the certificate current? World Athletics/AIMS certificates last 5 years and USATF certifications 10.
2. Does the race name a medical director and publish its medical plan? Look for medical tents at aid stations and defibrillators on the course.
3. Is there a weather alert system? A published flag system (green to black) and a clear policy on what happens if the race is shortened or cancelled.
4. Are the aid stations published and frequent? At least every 5 km, and more often in heat.
5. Are the cut-offs clear? You should know the time limit and what happens if you miss it (sweep bus, sidewalks, reopened roads).
6. Are the start waves based on predicted times? That's the difference between running and queueing.
7. Are the roads fully closed? Cones in a lane beside live traffic are a very different race.
8. Is the refund or deferral policy honest and easy to find? After New York cancelled in 2012 it kept its no-refund policy but guaranteed entry to the 2013 race (ESPN/AP).

Every race on Sunday Marathon links to its official website, so you can check these things before you register. Start with the Chicago Marathon, New York City Marathon, Berlin Marathon or Boston Marathon, or browse every upcoming marathon.

Are you a race director? You can claim your race listing on Sunday Marathon for free to keep your dates, distances and official links accurate for runners.

Sources

All sources were accessed on 21 September 2026.

1. World Athletics, Competition and Technical Rules, 2026 Edition: TR 55 (road races), CR 31.21 (road records), TR 19 (timing). PDF
2. World Athletics in co-operation with AIMS, The Measurement of Road Race Courses, revised edition 2023. PDF
3. World Athletics, Label Road Races Regulations (Book C, C1.6), in force from 12 August 2025. PDF
4. World Athletics, Competition Medical Guidelines, 2nd edition, October 2020. PDF
5. Alan Jones, History of the Jones Counter (1984), hosted by USATF RRTC. PDF
6. USATF, Certification Procedures. Page. Sanctions FAQs. Page
7. Kim JH et al., "Cardiac Arrest during Long-Distance Running Races," NEJM, 2012. DOI
8. Kim JH et al., "Cardiac Arrest During Long-Distance Running Races," JAMA, 2025. Full text
9. Almond CS et al., "Hyponatremia among Runners in the Boston Marathon," NEJM, 2005. DOI
10. Roberts WO, "A 12-yr profile of medical injury and illness for the Twin Cities Marathon," MSSE, 2000. DOI. "Determining a do not start temperature for a marathon," MSSE, 2010. DOI
11. Parker B et al., "Medical Tent Usage From Bank of America Chicago Marathon 2015–2017," Sports Health, 2021. DOI. Chan JL et al., Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 2019. DOI
12. Road Runners Club of America: Safe Event Guidelines, Permitting, Race Director Certification
13. England Athletics RunEvents: Race Directors' Handbook, Event Licensing
14. D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, Special Events Planning Guide, 2025. PDF
15. Bank of America Chicago Marathon: 2025 Media Guide, Course & Amenities, Rules & Safety, Street Closures
16. Boston Athletic Association: Info for Athletes, 2026 waves, 2024 race recap
17. London Marathon Events: 2026 Participant Event Guide, Vehicle Crossing Points 2026
18. BMW Berlin Marathon / SCC EVENTS: Race facts (German), Course, Race day for runners
19. Honolulu Marathon, An Open Finish Line
20. Twin Cities in Motion: Event Alert System, 2027 date move. MPR News, 2023 cancellation
21. World Athletics, Boston 2011 report and New York history. Boston.com, why Boston times don't count
22. Interviews and reporting: Meetings Today (Carey Pinkowski), Boston Globe (Dave McGillivray), amNY (Ted Metellus), NBC Boston, NBC Chicago, ABC News, ESPN/AP
23. Economic impact and fundraising: Bank of America (Chicago), NYRR via RRM, B.A.A., London Marathon Events

Header photo: Leviosa Hou on Unsplash.