Xiamen has 6 districts, but the 2026 Xiamen Marathon has 17 zones!This afternoon, the race bibs for the Xiamen Marathon were officially released, along with the starting zones and their corresponding standards. The 2026 Xiamen Marathon will start with "eight guns, seventeen zones" — possibly the most finely divided start arrangement of any marathon in China.
The cutoff for Corral A has been raised again, jumping from this year's 2:55:55 to 2:53:08. To start at the first gun next year, you basically need to be at a sub-3 level. Becausethis year the size of each corral in the first four waves has been reduced to 2,000 runners, 500 fewer than last year, so the number of runners in the first gun will be around 4,000.This year's first gun saw 5,000 starters, and in the end there were 2,481 sub-3-hour finishers. Although the first wave was smaller this year, the overall strength was stronger, and the C corral cutoff was raised by nearly two minutes, with entrants basically within 3 hours 12 minutes.
At the 2025 Chongqing Marathon the number of sub-3-hour finishers was 2,933, just shy of 3,000. Can this year's Xiamen Marathon be the first to get there and achieve the breakthrough ahead of Chongqing?
Notably, besides the front-row starters, the back-wave allocations have also changed. This year the 4 hours 43 minutes group was basically the last, but next year the final cutoff will be pushed out to around 5 hours 18 minutes 42 seconds, which could be good news for runners aiming to break five hours.
The Xiamen Marathon should have had over 3,000 sub-3 finishers this year — what do you think?
