Raw States
Blue Ridge Marathon
Roanoke, VA · Sports
- When
- April 17–18, 2027
- Where
- Elmwood Park · Roanoke · VA
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Approximate: based on past editions, not announced yet
Billed as America's toughest road marathon for its more than 7,000 feet of elevation change, this race climbs Mill Mountain and the Blue Ridge Parkway before finishing in downtown Roanoke's Elmwood Park. It has run every spring since 2010 and draws thousands of runners from across the country.
The history within reach
- Blue Ridge Marathonsame spot
Billed as America's toughest road marathon for its more than 7,000 feet of elevation change, this race climbs Mill Mountain and the Blue Ridge Parkway before finishing in downtown Roanoke's Elmwood Park.
Two blocks called the Yard held the Black business district of a segregated railroad city, and every touring act that could not sleep downtown slept at the Dumas Hotel and played the Strand: Ellington, Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong.
- The Class J 6110.5 mi
Norfolk and Western built its own locomotives in Roanoke and built them so well that the railway stayed with steam years after everyone else quit, and the streamlined Class J was the argument: a hundred and ten miles an hour on level track hauling a full passenger train.
- The Roanoke Star1.2 mi
Merchants put up an eighty-eight-foot neon star for the 1949 Christmas season as a shopping advertisement and then could not bring themselves to take it down, so the city adopted it, the nickname Star City followed, and it has burned over the valley ever since.
- Booker T. Washington15 mi
Born enslaved on a small tobacco farm in the Virginia Piedmont, and freed there at nine when a Union officer read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud from the porch.