How Many Six Star Marathon Finishers Are There?

Abbott World Marathon Majors have shared some interesting facts about Six Star finishers following the end of the 2024 marathon season, including how many people completed their six star journey in 2024 and the average time a Six Star finisher took to run each marathon. 

What Is A Six Star Finisher?

If you complete the six original Marathon Majors then you are awarded an additional Six Star medal. That means running the marathons in Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York (here’s everything you need to know about running the World Marathon Majors!). 

All you need to do is sign up to the star programme and they will automatically collect the stars for you based on your official race results. There’s no deadline on how long it takes you to run all six, or how fast you need to run each race, and you can run them in any order you want. 

What about the Sydney Marathon?

From 2025, the Sydney Marathon is going to be a Marathon Major, but there won’t be a Seven Star Medal. Instead there will eventually be a Nine Star medal introduced, meaning any runners who complete the nine Majors will get their Six Star medal and the Nine Star medal. 

So far, Cape Town is progressing well in its candidacy to become the eighth Major, and the Shanghai Marathon is also being assessed. The earliest that there will be a Nine Star medal is 2027. 

The Six Star medal remains in place for the original six Majors. 

Facts About Six Star Finishers In 2024! 

As of the end of 2024, there are 17,679 Six Star finishers. That’s 11,699 men, 5,979 women and one non-binary runner. 

A total of 4,892 people achieved their sixth star in 2024, and 46 people ran all six Marathon Majors in the calendar year.

229 people have completed the full Six Star journey at least twice. 

The average time that it takes between getting the first star and the sixth star, is eight years and one month.

People from 132 different countries have got a Six Star Medal. The 10 nations with the most Six Star finishers are: USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Canada, Spain, China, Mexico, Brazil and France. 

The average age of a Six Star finisher is 50 years and six months. And proving that age is just a number, more than 136 women Six Star finishers didn’t get their first star until after the age of 60! 

The average finish time for a Six Star runner is 4:03:05, but more than 2,000 runners have averaged more than five hours for their six marathons. 

Earlier in 2024, there were over 10,000 runners with five stars, so there are many more people close to becoming a Six Star finisher! 

Are you on your Six Star journey? 

All data is from AbbottWMM. And lead image from AbbottWMM.