A Six Star Marathon Major Journey
The Abbott Six Star Finisher programme tracks the runners who have completed the Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo marathons. In many respects, this is more a triumph of logistics and entry negotiation than pure sporting achievement! Nevertheless, having taken 14 years to complete these six marathons, I felt it was worth looking back for the archives…
As a brief history, the World Marathon Majors (WMM) series began in 2006 as an elite points-based competition linking the major marathons (initially without Tokyo). From 2013 the Tokyo Marathon was added, and non-elite runners were awarded a certificate for completing all six races. From 2016 a medal was introduced.
The races themselves have been around far longer: Boston (since 1897), New York City (1970), London (1981), Berlin (1974), and Chicago (1977). The Tokyo Marathon started more recently, in 2007.
The first marathon major I completed was the New York Marathon in November 2011. The race wasn’t exactly conveniently situated from Mid-Levels, Hong Kong, where I was based at the time; there’s a 12-hour time difference! I wasn’t thinking of completing all six Majors then: as I noted above, it wasn’t really a “thing” yet. I selected New York to join up with some of my old training group from Sydney, Australia.
Getting a race bib for a big city marathon can be challenging and has become more difficult over the years. For New York I used a travel company. My time was 3:29:10 (for the record). There were 47,000 finishers in 2011, compared with 55,000 in 2024. New York has always been a very big race!
The highlight of the New York Marathon is running through all five boroughs and finishing in Central Park. I can highly recommend this event.
My next major was Berlin, in September 2012. There was some stress getting into the race. A leading Hong Kong marathoner, JoeJoe Fan, was sponsored by Adidas and had organised a free entry for me, but then she had to pull out of the event. To complicate matters, I had relocated to Zurich in July 2012 just a few months before the race! It was only on the Monday before the event that I received final confirmation that a bib was waiting for me in Berlin.
The race itself was incredibly well organised, as you would expect in Germany. The marathon is dead flat — they hold a rollerblading competition on the same course the day before — and many World records have been set there. I didn’t set a World record, strange to relate, but my time of 3:24:44 was respectable (half-marathon splits of 1:42:50 and 1:41:54, a ‘negative split’). As a highlight, Berlin has a spectacular finish through the Brandenberg Gate.
A few years passed before I did my next marathon major, Boston, in April 2016. I gained entry by doing a ‘BQ’ (Boston qualifier) time at the Florence marathon in November 2014, with a time of 3.21.
To illustrate how much more difficult it is to enter these races now, if I had tried to qualify for the 2025 race the target time for M45–49 has been lowered to from 3:25 to 3:20. Despite that, 39,000 qualifiers applied, resulting in a cut-off of -6:51 (i.e. an effective qualifying time of 3:13:09). The qualifying standard for 2026 has been lowered again.
Of course, I am nearly 10 years older now and would need to meet a target of 3:30:00 for M55–59 (less a few minutes for over-subscription). Sadly, I have slowed down by much more than 10 minutes in the intervening years!
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Historically the BQ time has been regarded by American marathoners as a challenging but realistic target, with a bit of training, but it is rapidly becoming out of reach for most. Boston is now a difficult race to get into (though there are a limited number of charity and corporate alternatives).
Boston was memorable for me for setting my personal best there, 3:15:55. As a marathon major it’s special for its history and crowd support.
Looking back at my annual race reports, 2017 was the first year that I mentioned the goal of completing all six of the marathon majors. I ran London in April that year (in 3:26:24, for the record) to make it 4 out of 6.
All the majors offer similar avenues for entry: a handful of elite bibs, ‘good for age’ entries for fast but sub-elite runners, and tour operator packages (a sure thing, but expensive). There is also a general lottery, though for London the odds are slim — in 2025, 840,000 hopefuls entered the ballot for just 17,000 places.
A very popular route for London is to sign up with a charity, which is what I did, raising money for the UK Asthma Foundation. I would have preferred ‘Save the Rhinos’, but even charity spots are competitive! Ironically (or fittingly, perhaps), I recall my asthma playing up quite badly during training for London.
This is another race I’d strongly recommend (if you can get a bib). You run past many iconic landmarks, finishing at Buckingham Palace, with terrific crowd support.
It took 5 more years to get to the start line of my 5th marathon major in Chicago. I’d met the qualifying time of 3:30 at the Jervis Bay marathon in 2019, but then Covid hit. I ran the Sydney marathon as a 4 hour pacer just 3 weeks before Chicago, which may not have been the best preparation, and had a sore throat leading up to the race. So my time was an uninspiring 3:54 (barely faster than my pacing time in Sydney!). Nevertheless, my wife and I really enjoyed our trip to Chicago and the race itself is huge, well organising, and strongly supported by spectators.
Finally, my sixth finish: the Tokyo Marathon in March 2025. I would have liked to complete it in 2024, and entered a special lottery for runners with five completed majors. Naively, I assumed there would be just a handful of us entering — in fact, it was heavily oversubscribed, and I missed out. I eventually entered 2025 through a tour operator.
My average time for the first 5 majors was 3:30:12, tantalisingly close to 3:30. But I knew I was only in 4-hour shape for Tokyo and finished in 3:59:01. The course doesn’t have many notable sights, but it is exceptionally well organised, with large (if quieter) crowd support. The Japanese love their running!
Final statistics:
There are now 22,480 Six Star finishers, with an average age of 50 years 7 months and average marathon time of 4:03:57. It is a time-consuming, non-elite challenge — but there are worse ways to see the world!
From this year, the Sydney Marathon has been added as the 7th major (though the original six are grandfathered). Cape Town and Beijing are likely to follow in the coming years. I’ll be lining up for Sydney, my home town, next week.
