The course starts on the Champs-Élysées, runs east to the Bois de Vincennes, comes back along the Seine quays through the tunnels under the Louvre, and finishes in the Bois de Boulogne. It is flat, fast and unusually scenic for a big-city marathon, and the field is correspondingly enormous.
The 2026 edition recorded 57,464 finishers — an audited chip-timed figure, and one of the few numbers in this calendar that is exact rather than estimated. Finishers are not the same as starters, and neither is the same as the crowd on the pavement, which nobody counts.
Entry is by ballot, opened the previous year, with guaranteed places for qualifying times and for charity runners. It closes long before the race.
For anyone in Paris that Sunday and not running, the practical consequence is that the entire central east–west axis is shut from early morning until mid-afternoon, including the quay tunnels. Cross-river movement by car is effectively impossible; the métro is unaffected.
PlanningSeasonal window on an early-April Sunday; entry is by ballot and closes months ahead.