At mile 20 of the 2022 Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, Rainier Crawford wanted to sit down every three minutes. He was six years old, running the course with his parents and five siblings aged 11 to 20. His father, Ben Crawford, later said it took another sleeve of Pringles to get him into the family photo. He finished in 8 hours and 35 minutes.
The Flying Pig's rule said a marathon runner had to be 18. Organizers granted the Crawfords an exception. The family had already run the course as unregistered "bandits" in past years, and race officials judged it safer to have them registered. Photos of Rainier went viral. Olympian Kara Goucher criticized the family publicly. Child Protective Services visited their home in Bellevue, Kentucky, and found no evidence of abuse.
42cal's database lists 552 marathons, and 541 of them state a policy on minimum age. The minimums run from 7 in Honolulu to 20 in Italy, France and China. Eighty-two of those races, 15 percent, will register someone younger than 18. Nearly all 541 set their minimum at 16, 18 or 20. None of those three ages came from studying children who run marathons. Each traces to a different institutional decision, taken before anyone counted how those children fared.
| Minimum age | Races | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 44 | National federation rules in Italy, France and China, and World Athletics' championship rule |
| 18 | 409 | A 2001 advisory from marathon medicine's professional body |
| 16 | 54 | An administrative decision by New York Road Runners in 1981 |
In Italy, France and China the minimum age is 20
World Athletics, the global governing body, sets no minimum age for the marathon. As its rulebook puts it, "it is the regulations for each competition which determine which age groups will apply and whether... younger athletes can participate." The World Athletics Championships rulebook bars 18- and 19-year-olds from its marathon by name, alongside the 35km race walk. That floor of 20 is stricter than 497 of the 541 races in the database, 92 percent of them.
Italy's federation, FIDAL, caps competitors by age category and distance. Runners 16 and 17 years old cannot enter anything past 10 kilometers. Those 18 and 19 cannot pass the half marathon. The marathon opens only to the next category up, which starts at 20. France's federation uses the clock. Cadets, its youngest teenage category, cannot enter a race lasting more than an hour. Juniors, the tier above them, are capped at two hours. Anything longer belongs to the espoirs, who are 20 to 22. In French competition the rule bars a teenager from nearly every marathon, since almost nobody finishes one in under two hours. Chinese marathons publish 20 for the full distance. The Beijing Half Marathon publishes 18.
Japan requires runners to be 19
Six races in the database set their minimum at 19, five of them in Japan, and Tokyo is the largest. Its entry guideline requires a runner to be at least 19 on race day. Japan lowered its legal age of adulthood from 20 to 18 in April 2022, and Tokyo kept 19. The race has never published a reason.
Marathon doctors recommended 18 in 2001
Boston, London, Berlin, New York City, Sydney and Doha are among the 409 races that draw the line at 18. That minimum comes from an advisory statement on children and marathoning, approved in 2001 by IMMDA, the medical committee of AIMS. The statement counted roughly 150 races in the AIMS roster of the day, among them "the world's largest and most prestigious marathons." Stephen Rice and Susan Waniewski wrote it. "Marathon running should be reserved only for those individuals who have reached their eighteenth birthday," it says.
A child has more skin for their body weight than an adult. Children also produce more heat when they run, and sweat less efficiently, so they get hotter faster over a long race. They take more steps to cover the same ground, and each footstrike lands with three to six times body weight, between 500 and 1,000 times per mile on each leg. Heat and impact are the whole of the statement's physiological case, and neither explains why the line falls at 18.
"There is ample time to increase one's mileage and personal goals when athletes begin college competition at approximately age eighteen," the statement says. The authors also allowed an exception. A well-trained young runner, they wrote, "can have a positive experience from participating in marathons prior to eighteen years of age. This special individual would be the exception and not the rule." The statement appeared as a peer-reviewed paper two years later in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. Another physician published a formal comment on it there in 2005, and Rice and Waniewski replied in the same pages.
New York Road Runners set a minimum age of 16 in 1981
Fifty-four races set their minimum at 16, including Chicago. New York Road Runners set it first, for the New York City Marathon, in 1981. A peer-reviewed review of the sport's youth-running evidence, published in 2024, says rules like New York's "were primarily implemented for administrative purposes and lacked a foundation in outcomes data." Before 1981 New York City had no age rule, and roughly 75 children between 8 and 13 ran the race in its early years. Wesley Paul finished it in 1977 at age 8, his fourth marathon. He had run his first a year earlier, at seven, in Columbia, Missouri, in just over four hours. Scott Black ran New York at 9 in 1979. Both went on to law careers, Paul as a partner at a national firm, Black as a senior trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I wouldn't do anything differently," Black said decades later. "I find that running has defined me as a person." New York Road Runners raised its minimum to 18 in 1988.
Honolulu, Lincoln and the races with no age limit
The Marine Corps Marathon sets its minimum age at 14 for every distance above 10 kilometers, the most permissive rule among the large American races. Honolulu mentions age once on its website: "Registration is open to everyone aged over seven years old." Read literally, over seven makes the youngest eligible runner 8, and the race has never said which it means. Lincoln, Nebraska, sets its minimum age at 8 on race day, and its policy covers every race participant, the full marathon included. Three more races, in Grand Rapids, the Fox Cities and Bismarck, publish no minimum age at all. "While our Marathon and Half Marathon do not have a minimum age requirement, please consult your doctor before starting to train for a long-distance event," the Fox Cities FAQ says. Grand Rapids answered a 15-year-old asking about entry: "As long as your mom is cool with it, and you're trained properly, I have no problem... (Our youngest marathon finisher was 9.)"
Mary Etta Boitano ran her first marathon in 1969, at five, before any of these rules existed. At 7 she ran the Petaluma Marathon in just under four hours. She ran more than 40 marathons before she turned 14. At 10 she won the Dipsea, a separate footrace, beating the whole field to become its first female overall winner. Her marathon best that year, 3:01:15, ranked her 13th among all women marathoners in the world. At 60 she was still running, with roughly 168,000 miles behind her, and she went on to coach high school track in Napa County.
What happened to the children who ran
A 2021 systematic review of injuries in young distance runners kept 9 studies for analysis, 7 of them case reports or case series. It found no correlation between running mileage and injury, and concluded only that young runners "may be" more vulnerable to injury in the growth plates, the still-forming cartilage near the ends of the bones. A 2024 narrative review traced the entire published record and found 32 documented cases of growth-plate injury across every youth sport, two of them in distance runners. The same review found no recorded case of a cardiac fatality in a child at a marathon.
Roberts and Nicholson followed every runner aged 7 to 17 at the Twin Cities Marathon over 26 years. Their 2010 paper counted 310 finishers. Four needed medical attention at the finish line, all of it minor, a rate of 12.9 per 1,000 finishers. That worked out to about half the rate among adults, an odds ratio of 0.52. With only four cases, the statistical range around that figure was wide enough to cover a real safety advantage or no difference at all.
A 2022 study by Goldman and colleagues followed 1,927 adolescents through a 28-week marathon training program in Los Angeles. They came from 50 high schools and 34 middle schools. About one in five was injured, the high schoolers more often than the middle schoolers. Most injuries were acute and cost an average of 4.8 days of training. Of those who started the marathon, 99 percent finished. The authors put the program's injury rate below published rates for adult marathon training.
Only the Flying Pig changed its rules
IMMDA revised its advisory in 2009, the year before the Twin Cities data appeared, and 409 races still draw the line at 18. New York Road Runners has not revisited its 1981 decision since raising it to 18 in 1988. The Flying Pig rewrote its age rules in 2023, after Rainier Crawford's run made headlines. The new ladder set the marathon at 18 and the half at 14. The 10K, the relay and the 14K all require runners to be 12, and nothing below 10K carries an age limit. The race also added a waiver process for any exception:
- approval from a parent
- approval from the child's primary care physician
- permission for the race's medical staff to discuss the child's participation with that physician
- a meeting with the race's medical staff, in person or by phone
- either a guide to run with the child for the whole event or a personal emergency action plan
- submission at least 30 days before race day, with the decision left to the race's board, staff and medical team
Rainier ran the Flying Pig again the next year, at 7, in 8 hours and 15 minutes. He ran it as a bandit. The race had refused to register him.
Further reading
- IMMDA's 2001 advisory on children and marathoning: the document that set 18 as the sport's most common minimum age, and the source of its own stated exception.
- World Athletics' Series Regulations for its World Championships: the rule closing the marathon to 18- and 19-year-old athletes.
- Grivas, "Beyond the Finish Line," Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2024: the review that traced the sport's youth age rules to administrative decisions rather than outcomes data.
- Roberts and Nicholson's 26-year study of youth finishers at the Twin Cities Marathon: the medical-encounter data behind the "no worse than adults" finding.
- Goldman et al.'s study of Students Run LA's marathon training program: the injury-rate data from 1,927 adolescent trainees.
- ESPN's account of the Crawford family and the Flying Pig Marathon: the fullest reporting on Rainier's run and its aftermath.
- Fox19's report on the Flying Pig's 2023 age-policy rewrite: the new tiered minimums and waiver process.
- The ABA Journal's profile of Wesley Paul and Scott Black: both ran the New York City Marathon as children before the 1981 rule existed.
