Every year, marathons in New York and Chicago draw some 40,000 participants each.
But not the San Francisco Marathon. The race, which takes place July 25, attracted fewer than 7,000 runners last year, and open slots for the upcoming event remain plentiful. The reason: San Francisco's famous hills, which draw tourists from around the world, are a bear for runners to traverse. "To put it tactfully, this course is not for the casual runner," says Jenny Schmitt, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Marathon.
The San Francisco Marathon's low profile frustrates its fans. This year, the race's organizers have hired new publicists to try to raise its profile. Many runners loath to do the full race have been drawn to a half-marathon option added about a decade ago, and more recently a second half-marathon alternative route has been put in place.
Going the whole distance in San Francisco has put off some first-time marathoners who don't want to risk falling short of the finish line. And many seasoned runners don't want to waste their energies on a race that offers no hope of setting a personal record.
For example, the fastest of Julie Fingar's six finishes in San Francisco was 3 hours, 29 minutes. That's 19 minutes slower than her fastest finish of the Boston Marathon, says Ms. Fingar, a 34-year-old running star and an organizer of the San Francisco Marathon. Still, she says, because of the difficulty of the course, "it really means something when you finish this marathon."
San Francisco is one of America's most beautiful marathons. At about mile six, a point typically reached about an hour after the marathon's 5:30 a.m. start, runners cresting a challenging hill ease onto the Golden Gate Bridge, run across it and loop back—in one direction, typically visible through the fog, is a national park and in the other are the landmarks of San Francisco.
In a sizzling hot month that is largely bereft of marathons in many parts of the U.S., San Francisco offers running addicts a race where temperatures rarely exceed 60 degrees. That, in fact, is why I recently decided to run this year's San Francisco Marathon. Although I'm based in Chicago, a recent weeks-long assignment in New York started me taking hours-long jogs around Central Park. It also got me thinking about running a marathon for the first time in nearly two decades. Hitting the Internet in search of a summer race, I found few options other than the San Francisco Marathon.
Going the Distance
Comparing elevations for three major marathons
Over the years, San Francisco Marathon organizers have dismissed talk of altering the course to make it easier, choosing instead to take runners through all of the city's most-famous neighborhoods. "The Embarcadero, the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge—for me there is no more beautiful marathon," says Nicole Matthews, 29, a veteran marathoner from Brentwood, Calif.
Unlike the ING New York Marathon or the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, San Francisco lacks a large corporate sponsor. That not only leaves it with little marketing clout but also without the large purse needed to attract a field of professional runners. The first-place finishers in New York and Chicago can collect six-figure cash prizes. Such rewards can boost overall attendance, because the slowest marathoners often get a thrill from running the same course as the world's fastest.
But the San Francisco Marathon has no purse and is typically won by amateurs such as Andrew Cook, who coaches running at a high school in Flower Mound, Texas. Mr. Cook, 29, finished first in San Francisco the last three years. (He isn't running this year because his wife is preparing to give birth.)
Back in Texas, Mr. Cook finds that he doesn't get much credit for running—let alone winning—the San Francisco Marathon. "People will say, 'Have you run the Boston Marathon?' " he says. "Problem is, nobody's ever heard of the San Francisco Marathon."
To be sure, obscurity also plagues other marathons, in large part because the number of races keeps expanding. There are currently about 475 active marathons in the U.S., double the number from 25 years ago, says Running USA, an industry-supported research center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Even with the number of marathon runners increasing steadily—the number rose nearly 10% to about 467,000 in 2009 from a year earlier—many of the 26.2-mile races struggle to attract crowds of runners.
The San Francisco Marathon is far from being America's most difficult 26.2-mile course—a distinction that likely belongs to next month's Pike's Peak marathon. San Francisco isn't even the most difficult marathon in California. Harder yet is the Big Sur International Marathon, a spring-time race that took Ms. Fingar three hours, 46 minutes to complete.
As a professionally managed marathon, San Francisco is an official qualifying race for the Boston Marathon—a race famous not only for its long history but for its high standards. Only fast runners, those who have run a previous marathon in speedy fashion, at the top of their age group, are allowed entry into Boston.
Some marathons such as Chicago's are famously flat and fast and therefore popular among runners wanting to qualify for Boston. But to do so in San Francisco is altogether harder. "It's more prestigious to qualify for Boston on a harder course," says Jennifer Lashua, a 33-year-old retailing executive who in 2008 qualified for the Boston Marathon with a San Francisco Marathon time of three hours, 23 minutes. Even so, that time was a full 11 minutes slower than her best Chicago marathon time.
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