The L.A. marathon’s final 8 miles are a blazing hot concrete hellscape. I learned to love them anyway

For a blissful 11 years, the route for the Los Angeles Marathon followed San Vicente Boulevard downhill for the last 4 miles until it hit the coast.

The homestretch, alongside Palisades Park and vistas of the blue Pacific, took you nearly to the Santa Monica pier as you crossed the finish line.

Not anymore.

Now, just as you approach the postcard final leg, the course sharply turns around and you spend the last 4 miles backtracking along a grueling, hot, concrete hellscape (sorry Century City).

Veteran L.A. distance runners still revel in the nostalgia. Newbie marathoners, like myself, are mostly just jealous we never got to experience it.

I ran my first marathon last year on the new course (bib 7600 if you don’t believe me). On Sunday, I plan to line up with more than 26,000 fellow marathoners at Dodger Stadium and do it all again.

That’s because, for as much hate as the new course gets, I’ve learned to love it.

The McCourt Foundation, which runs the marathon, announced the course change in 2020, saying the finish line festivities had outgrown the tightly packed Santa Monica beachfront — a realization it came to when Santa Monica significantly increased the cost of hosting the event.

With the change, the course no longer would be called “Stadium to the Sea,” but instead “Stadium to the Stars,” referring to the Avenue of the Stars.

The extravagantly named street — not to be confused with the Hollywood Walk of Fame — is not where you’ll see movie stars, but more likely Westside AMC A-Listers who frequent the Westfield Century City mall.

The new course is easy to take shots at.

After 18 miles through L.A.’s charming and iconic neighborhoods — Chinatown, Echo Park, Hollywood, Beverly Hills — the road opens up into a six-lane concrete nightmare surrounded by nondescript corporate buildings and the occasional gas station.

(The Marathon’s official map, notably, does not list a single new landmark after Mile 19.)

The main race begins at 7 a.m. By the time you hit Mile 20, the sun is beating down on the pavement at full force and slowly cooking you. You then run alongside a different kind of L.A. landmark: the 405.

But fear not: The noise and stink of the 405 is readily overshadowed by the pain of a slow, steady hill. At this point in the race, every cell in your body is screaming for you to stop — except perhaps for the last few resilient neurons in your brain.

The real kicker is that, before the turnaround at Mile 22, you are not only actively running away from the finish line, but you are also watching a steady stream of runners on the other side of the street who are miles ahead and, in no uncertain terms, better than you at running and presumably life.

Why do any of us run and train for marathons, anyway? Sure, the “kudos” on the Strava running app are nice, but I do it for the almost spiritual state I enter when I’m alone on Mile 16 of a long run.

When your whole body aches — your Achilles tendon feels like it’s on the verge of snapping and that ominous feeling in your knee returns — every step feels like proof you can do great things.

Running is hard. For everything in life that “isn’t a sprint,” the L.A. Marathon is my training.

Once we cross the finish line, it’s those final 8 miles of blazing concrete that we wear as a badge of honor. An exceptional, shared experience among my fellow 26,000-plus marathoners.

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Jim Rainey, staff reporter
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