Los Angeles Marathon

The LA Marathon runs from Dodger Stadium to the Pacific Ocean — a diagonal line across one of the most recognizable cities on earth. Finishing on Ocean Avenue with the water in front of you after running through Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air is its own kind of surreal, and an LA Marathon finisher poster captures that diagonal in a way that's immediately readable. You ran across the city.

LA Marathon at a glance

• Point-to-point: Dodger Stadium (Elysian Park) to Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica — "Stadium to the Sea"
• Open registration: No lottery, no qualifying time — first come, first served
• Course: Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood, Century City, Santa Monica
• Scale: ~25,000 finishers — more accessible than NYC or Chicago
• Date: Mid-March; 6:30 AM wave start to get ahead of the heat

The course

The race starts in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and drops into Echo Park before the first miles flatten out into Hollywood. Running down Hollywood Boulevard is genuinely strange — the Walk of Fame is underfoot, the Hollywood Hills are the backdrop, and the crowd in West Hollywood a few miles later is among the most energetic on the course. The early miles through these neighborhoods tend to feel easy, which is worth filing away.

Around miles 14 and 15, the course climbs into Bel Air. The roads are winding, the trees are big, and the hills are real — this is where the race gets honest. Most runners who go out too fast through WeHo find out about it somewhere in these miles. The Bel Air section is brief but meaningful, and once you crest it, the course descends through Westwood and Century City toward the coast. The diagonal path from east to west, from a baseball stadium through Hollywood to the Pacific, is what makes the LA Marathon such a distinctive custom route map — no other major runs a line quite like it.

Ocean Avenue at the finish has the Santa Monica Pier below and the Pacific ahead. On a clear March morning it's a hard image to beat.

The route you ran across Los Angeles is worth preserving. makemap turns that diagonal into a poster printed from your own GPS data.