The World's Highest Marathon Starts at 17,600 Feet — and the Record Is Under 3 Hours 29 Minutes

Every year on 29 May, a start gun goes off at roughly 5,360 metres — higher than every mountain in the continental United States — and about 250 people start running. Not up. Down: 42.195 kilometres down the Everest Base Camp trail, past the foot of the Khumbu Icefall, through yak pastures and pine forest, dropping nearly two vertical kilometres before the finish line in a Sherpa village with an Irish pub. It is, by Guinness World Record recognition, the highest marathon on Earth — and it has been run every year since 2003.

The event traces back further than its famous name. British runners Jan Turner and Tony Hunt first organised an Everest Marathon in 1985, held every two years through the 1990s. In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the first summit, organisers relaunched it as the 'Golden Jubilee Everest Marathon' and renamed it the Tenzing-Hillary Everest Marathon from 2004 onward, run annually and approved by Nepal's Tourism Board ever since. It follows almost the identical trail our own guides walk clients down on the Everest Base Camp trek — Gorak Shep, Lobuche, Pheriche, Tengboche, Namche — except runners cover in a few hours what most trekkers take four or five unhurried days to descend, at altitudes where simply walking uphill leaves most visitors breathless.

That descent is what makes the race brutal in a completely different way from a road marathon. Runners lose roughly 1,920 metres of elevation over the full distance, on loose scree, stone steps and swaying suspension bridges rather than pavement, while still starting high enough that altitude sickness is a real risk if they haven't spent the prior two weeks acclimatising. There's no flying in for race day — every entrant has to trek up to Base Camp first, on foot, just to reach the start line.

Both records have stood for close to two decades. Frost's run broke the previous best by 27 minutes — a mark set by her own teammate, Angela Mudge, just two years earlier — and it remains the only sub-five-hour women's finish in the race's history. For context, a strong recreational road marathoner at sea level might run 4:30–5:00; doing it at these altitudes, on this terrain, in that window is a genuinely different class of effort.

What this means for trekkers

If you do want to see it as a runner, entries for the roughly 250 spots go through registered trekking operators and typically fill for the following May well in advance, since every runner also needs the standard Sagarmatha National Park and Khumbu Pasang Lhamu permits — plus the multi-day trek up to Base Camp itself before the gun even fires. For most travellers reading about it from a phone screen, the more realistic, and our guides would argue more enjoyable, way to see this exact stretch of the Khumbu is on foot at trekking pace, with time to actually look up at the mountain everyone's really there for. We've also covered what the trail itself is really like day to day — Wi-Fi, a pub and cold showers included.

Source: Trail Running Nepal

Cover photo: Gerd Eichmann via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).