Topline:
The L.A. Marathon is Sunday. And just like the great city where it is held, this 26.2 mile run is special. Your guide to why is marathoner and our beloved colleague Sharon McNary.
The 5 things that make the marathon special:
Go deeper: Read more about each reason, and find useful information for Sunday's Marathon, by clicking below.
I’ve run a lot of marathons in a lot of places, so I have a strong basis for comparison, but I’m also a SoCal native so, of course, I have a strong local bias. But after 162 marathons, (my 163rd is tomorrow!) these are the things that make the L.A. Marathon very special to me.
Marathoning can be a very white sport. There are lots of theories as to why that I won’t go into here (Runner’s World has a few.)
But in Los Angeles, distance running is for everybody — some 26,000 participants this year, the second largest field in the marathon’s history. You will see it at the free pre-marathon expo at Dodger Stadium where entire families accompany their athlete to pick up their race packets. When I used to volunteer at my running club’s booth at the expo, my conversations with them were as likely to be in Spanish as in English.
And while diversity often means race or ethnicity, I also mean it in the broader sense. You will see every body type at the L.A. Marathon. Sure, the skinnier people are up front running fast. But you will see every size of person taking on the marathon challenge.
There is also a wide diversity of speeds. Forty percent of the field are attempting their very first marathon. The official course keeps streets open for six and a half hours. But lots of people take longer. They will run, or run with walk breaks and even walk the whole route, taking seven or eight hours.
When the streets reopen to traffic at 6.5 hours after the last person crosses the start line, folks move to the sidewalk and continue on to the finish, where volunteers greet them with medals and food, even if it’s a few hours after the official clocks have come down. Some of those late finishers will be the 95 “Legacy” participants who have run every single L.A. Marathon.
Age diversity also sets the L.A. Marathon apart. The oldest man is 90 and the oldest woman is 85. But on the young side, some 3,200 public school kids from nearly 200 public middle and high schools who trained with Students Run L.A will flood the marathon zone in their white shirts. It’s astonishing to see so many young people running so far.
Normally, a kid has to be 16 to register for the marathon but the exceptions are those who train with Students Run L.A. It is a nonprofit organization that trains kids to run long distance races. Training starts in September in small, school-based volunteer-led groups. The volunteers include a mix of teachers, parents and other community saints and over the months, the kids do local training runs and then come together en masse at six races of increasing distances, topping out at 18.6 miles in the Friendship Run at Hanson Dam.
I’ve seen this program develop since the early '90s, and I admire how well-prepared the kids show up to the start line these days.
So many famous things to see on the marathon route. Dodger Stadium, Chinatown, City Hall and other civic buildings, plus Little Tokyo, Disney Hall, Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral.
On Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park, you pass Angelus Temple, founded by pioneering broadcast evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. After around 13 miles, you’d find yourself in Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard, passing El Capitan Theater, where Jimmy Kimmel has pranked runners in past years, offering up money for a marathon bib or serving chilled Alaskan King Crab on ice, or super-glueing water bottles to a table.
You’ll go through Sunset Strip and past the West Hollywood cheerleaders, and run on Rodeo Drive past ritzy stores in Beverly Hills. From there, it’s on to the Veterans Administration in West L.A.
The Los Angeles Marathon course, until the pandemic, was a stellar, international destination race, with a route going all the way to Santa Monica. They called it the “Stadium to the Sea." But the pandemic ended Santa Monica’s participation, which is sad because it was pretty epic to be able to run from downtown to the ocean.
These days, you hang a U-turn at the VA campus at mile 22 and head back uphill four more miles on Santa Monica Boulevard to Century City and the finish line at Avenue of the Stars. So now they call it “Stadium to the Stars.” As before, when you run across the finish line, you get your medal and banana and you’re all done, but the limping and bragging.
Students Run L.A. is the largest group I know of that participates in the marathon, but another thing that sets this race apart is how many large scale clubs are training runners and walkers to complete the marathon.
The first of the really big clubs was the L.A. Leggers. (Yes, it’s a pun on the L.A. Lakers.) It was formed in 1989 to take experienced and new athletes through the months of training. It was offering something very new: running with walk breaks, based on the writings of Olympian Jeff Galloway.
This was revolutionary back in the years when you wouldn’t consider yourself a real runner if you couldn’t go under four hours. Adding walk breaks to running helped people go farther with less fatigue and injury.
I joined the Leggers in mid-1990 and ran my first L.A. Marathon in 1991. So many people wanted to join and eventually other large groups formed including L.A. Roadrunners, the Pasadena Pacers, Loma Linda Lopers, Frontrunners and more recently, Keep It Run Hundred, Skid Row Runners and many other groups.
Then there are the many charity groups. The marathon itself is now run by the McCourt Foundation, raising money for research of neurological diseases. And other charities use participation in the marathon to raise funds as well.
One of the things I most enjoy about running a marathon is seeing all the people who come out to cheer. Sometimes I can see the same groups of people a dozen times as they drive, ride or take transit from place to place to see their person.
Some carry funny signs, like, “Never trust a fart” (bathroom humor is big among marathoners) or “Your feet hurt so much because you’re kicking so much butt!” Sometimes kids hold out their hands for a high five, which I never comply because, well, they have no idea where my hands have been that day, and vice versa.
It’s possible to use Metro trains to follow your athlete partway along the marathon course without having to deal with hassling road closures.
If you want to track a person during the race, there’s an app for that, but only if they are willing to carry a phone with them. Download the “Active Experience App” from your app store and then search for the 2024 Los Angeles Marathon.
You can see when all runners and walkers hit various milestones in the race, as well as race results Check your athlete’s race results here.
Go to our comprehensive guide for other information on the marathon here.
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Faith leaders both in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena and Pasadena — devastated by the pair of fires that tore across Southern California — have relied on interfaith and community partnerships to rally congregants who are picking up the pieces 16 months later.
Why it matters: They’ve had to learn on the fly about insurance coverage and local land use regulations while still trying to keep their scattered flock together and raising money for basic needs. Pastors in Altadena have had to fight to protect the rights of Black people who decades ago found pathways to home ownership in that community despite redlining — but now risk losing their land to outside developers who sense an investment opportunity.
Interfaith relationships: This would have been difficult for faith leaders to handle but for the interfaith relationships that became closer and stronger after the fires, said the Rev. Grace Park, associate pastor at Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, which burned down.
Read on ... for more on how faith leaders in SoCal are uniting after the fires.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
Rabbi Amy Bernstein says the wind-whipped fire in January 2025 that scorched much of the Pacific Palisades, destroying her home and damaging her synagogue, “blew everything open” for the community’s faith leaders.
“If our hearts must break, let them break open,” said the rabbi, who leads Kehillat Israel where 300 families out of 900 lost their homes. “This tragedy has really pushed us closer to one another. We’re working to change the things we need changed.”
Faith leaders both in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena and Pasadena — devastated by the pair of fires that tore across Southern California — have relied on interfaith and community partnerships to rally congregants who are picking up the pieces 16 months later.
They’ve had to learn on the fly about insurance coverage and local land use regulations while still trying to keep their scattered flock together and raising money for basic needs. Pastors in Altadena have had to fight to protect the rights of Black people who decades ago found pathways to home ownership in that community despite redlining — but now risk losing their land to outside developers who sense an investment opportunity.
And throughout this span, faith leaders have had to cater to the emotional and spiritual needs of their communities and think about how they want to rebuild their sanctuaries that were lost or damaged in the fire. More than a dozen houses of worship burned to the ground or were damaged.
This would have been difficult for faith leaders to handle but for the interfaith relationships that became closer and stronger after the fires, said the Rev. Grace Park, associate pastor at Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, which burned down.
Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews and yogis have not just found common ground in human suffering and loss, but have learned how to lean on one another in a time of dire need, she said.
“It’s a sense of mutual affection and respect, learning from each other and leaning on one another,” Park said. “We’re sharing the joys and the deep valleys of what it means to lead through a time of tragedy.”
Brother Satyananda, a senior monk at the Self Realization Fellowship, lost his living quarters and belongings in the fire. Much of the campus, started by Paramahamsa Yogananda who brought ancient spiritual practices from India to the West, fortunately survived the fire.
Satyananda recalls one day when Bernstein picked up on his sadness and offered him “motherly compassion.”
“We share the same profession where we’re tuned to people in need,” he said. “Now, our relationship has changed because we’re tuning into each other. There’s a greater level of trust.”
Pastor BJ King, who leads LoveLand LifeCenter, worked with the late Rev. Cecil B. Murray to heal communities and build interfaith coalitions after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“Back then, there was a choice whether or not to get involved,” he said. “But with these fires, there is no choice. It has affected everybody.”
King’s congregation has switched to online services after their leased church building in Altadena suffered smoke damage. Twelve families lost their homes. In addition to helping meet people’s basic needs, King has created a program organizing gatherings to connect therapists with those in need of mental health.
“Many people didn’t even know they needed that,” he said.
One of the most powerful roles faith leaders have played after the fire is to “continue to talk with power, people in charge,” said Pastor Jonathan DeCuir, who leads Victory Bible Church in Pasadena. He and others in the region have continued to meet with local officials and even conferred with Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep things moving for their communities.
DeCuir chairs the board of a nonprofit called Legacy Land Project, which provides financial aid, legal support and guidance on building contractors, as well as medical care to those affected by the fires.
The disaster has brought a level of camaraderie that DeCuir says he has never seen among the region’s clergy.
“Denominational lines have been crossed,” he said. “Even if we have different theological stances or approaches to ministry, we are all now looking at how to care for our people and community. If we don’t come together, Altadena will never ever be the same. The people won’t be there anymore. That, to me, is terrifying.”
While a church is more than a building, physical churches do appear as “beacons of hope” in traumatized communities, said Pastor Mayra Macedo-Nolan, executive director of Clergy Community Coalition in Pasadena. Her group has lobbied for houses of worship to be prioritized on the same footing as businesses in the rebuilding plan.
“When people start seeing churches rebuilding in Altadena, they’re going to feel like it’s going to be OK because the churches are coming back,” she said.
On April 26, the Altadena Fountain of Life Church broke ground to build a new sanctuary after their house of worship, which had stood for over three decades, was destroyed in the fire. Pastor Jonathan Lewis, who ministers to about 75, hopes the church will be ready in time for Easter next year.
“It’ll be a Resurrection Sunday for our church, too,” he said.
Alexis Duncan, who grew up in Altadena attending that church, came to the groundbreaking with her 6-year-old daughter. She lost both her home and her church building.
“It means everything to me that they’re rebuilding because I want the church to be there for my daughter as she grows up,” she said. “This new beginning gives me and my family hope and the encouragement to come back.”
Some churches like Altadena Community Church, a United Church of Christ congregation, are pausing to rethink their future purpose. The Rev. Michael Lewis, who took over in February after the previous pastor retired, said the congregation is looking into several possibilities for the one-acre lot, including affordable housing.
“We know that a church is not intended to be a landlord and the pastor is no property manager,” he said. “But, we’re also thinking about who is able to return to Altadena? How will this rich, economically diverse community that was scattered by the fire come back?”
The church has been around since the 1940s. A haven for actors, poets and musicians, the former sanctuary also served as a vibrant performance space. Lewis said they hope to incorporate a performance stage into the new facility.
“It’ll look different from what we had before,” he said. “Once we figure out how to build community, we can decide what physical structures will help us support that community.”
As for Kehillat Israel, on May 15, members will carry their Torah scrolls back to their sanctuary, marking one of the first returns by a house of worship to the Palisades since the disaster.
Judaism has had “a long history of starting over,” Bernstein said.
“It’s encoded in our cultural approach to the world, that there are things that can always be taken away from you,” she said. “But what you become can never get taken away.”
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Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he has requested a yearlong extension of FEMA funding for L.A. fire survivors. Without the extension, the money will run out July 9. Now the decision on FEMA support lies with the federal government.
Why it matters: The funds have allowed many survivors to afford temporary housing and other daily needs.
The backstory: Most survivors have yet to return home — 2 in 3 survivors who were living in Altadena or Pacific Palisades at the time of the fires are still displaced, according to the latest survey of more than 2,100 survivors by the nonprofit Department of Angels.
Read on ... for more on why fire survivors are calling on the feds to extend the funding.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he has requested a yearlong extension of FEMA funding for L.A. fire survivors. Without the extension, the money will run out July 9.
Now the decision on FEMA support lies with the federal government.
The funds have allowed many survivors to afford temporary housing and other daily needs. Most have yet to return home — 2 in 3 survivors who were living in Altadena or Pacific Palisades at the time of the fires are still displaced, according to the latest survey of more than 2,100 survivors by the nonprofit Department of Angels. Nearly 40% of respondents reported they will either soon run out of temporary housing insurance coverage or have already.
The situation is particularly dire for low-income households: Nearly 80% of respondents making $50,000 or less said they didn’t think they could afford housing for three months once coverage ended.
“The data is clear: This recovery is not over,” said Angela Giacchetti of the Department of Angels at a news conference organized by the Eaton Fire Collaborative in Altadena on Thursday. “If you are a survivor, you know this in your bones. For many families, it has barely begun. People have just begun to stabilize. We need federal support that reflects the scale of this disaster and systems that survivors can actually navigate and access over time.”
The FEMA Individuals and Households Program can provide funding for survivors of disasters to pay for temporary housing, repair their homes, and respond to other challenges that insurance may not cover. It can also help cover costs if a survivor has no insurance.
Gil Barel has been relying on FEMA funds to pay rent on a small back house for herself and her son for the last year. She said they still haven’t been able to return to their rent-controlled Pasadena apartment because of smoke damage, though she still has to pay the rent for it.
Barel doesn’t know what they’ll do if the FEMA funding runs out.
“ I'm really stressed out,” she said. “I think I'm just kind of trying to put that thought aside and hope for the best.”
But in the 15 months since the fires, most survivors have not accessed FEMA funding. About 60% have received no FEMA assistance beyond the initial $770 payments dispersed in the immediate aftermath of the fires, according to the Department of Angels survey.
Many have faced denials, according to disaster case manager workers with Catholic Charities of L.A. and lawyers with Legal Aid Foundation of L.A.
That’s the situation for Gayle Nicholls-Ali and her husband, Rasheed, who lost their Altadena home of 15 years in the Eaton Fire. They’ve relied on their insurance to pay for a rental in Montrose, but that’s rapidly running out. And because they have that insurance, FEMA has denied further support.
“A lot of our ALE [Additional Living Expenses insurance] is going to run out before we even are able to get into a house,” Nicholls-Ali said.
Without FEMA or insurance support, they’ll have to find a way to pay rent on top of a mortgage. They also face a big gap in the cost of their rebuild versus how much their insurance covers. Nicholls-Ali said without the help of FEMA and other sources of funding, recovering feels further out of reach.
FEMA funding extensions have been routine in past disasters, including the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii and after devastating flooding in North Carolina in 2024.
But the agency has faced significant cuts during the second Trump administration, and there are indications that disaster aid is becoming increasingly political. For example, President Donald Trump has approved aid for just 23% of requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, compared to 89% for states that with Republican governors and senators, according to an analysis by Politico.
The state has also not received more than $33 billion for long-term recovery, which can help pay for infrastructure upgrades and repairs, as well as help rebuild schools, parks and homes. That money was requested by state and local leaders shortly after the January 2025 fires and hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.
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An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.
Where they're looking: These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.
Why it matters: The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.
An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.
These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.
The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.
Here's how authorities are using the practice of contact tracing to contain the outbreak and keep the hantavirus from spreading.
The concept of modern contact tracing dates to the 1930s and was part of an effort to stop the spread of syphilis. It involves locating the close contacts of anyone who may have been infected. "By identifying people who are at risk of infection," says Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan, "you try to get ahead when people don't have symptoms yet with the goal of preventing the infection from continuing to propagate."
This is a well-tested approach for containing an infectious disease. "It's the oldest tool in the epidemiologic toolbox," explains Malani. "We thought about this a lot early in the pandemic with COVID. But we also do contact tracing for sexually transmitted infections, for things like meningitis and even measles."
Malani likens contact tracing to monitoring ripples in a pond, "trying to prevent those outer rings from propagating by isolating individuals and by identifying individuals who might be at risk of infection."
The idea that "there's a time period where people don't have symptoms but could be harboring the virus, that's what contact tracing helps identify," says Malani.
It starts by pinpointing someone with an infection or suspected infection of the disease in question — in this case, hantavirus. Epidemiologists then look to see with whom they've recently had close contact since these individuals are more likely to have been infected.
This hunt for those with the greatest probability of infection is important. "Otherwise, it becomes an impossible web to contain because everyone is connected to everyone," says Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor at Emory University. "So you have to stratify by high, intermediate and low-risk contacts."
The next step involves public health agencies ordering precautions for those who are infected or who may be infected but aren't showing symptoms yet. Such measures may include quarantine, so that an individual doesn't come into contact with even more people — who may then become infected.
One challenge that hantavirus presents is that its incubation period can last up to several weeks. In other words, "people take a long time to become symptomatic after they've been exposed," says Titanji. "Some of these primary contacts would have to be monitoring themselves for symptoms for up to 45 days to be at the tail end of that very long incubation period."
The work isn't high-tech but it is painstaking, requiring officials to reconstruct the many interactions someone may have had over days or weeks.
Onboard the cruise ship, "you might have an individual who is a source of an infection," says Titanji, laying out a hypothetical example. "And then they were sitting at a dinner table with one individual who then goes back to their cabin and shares a bed with their partner who has a conversation with someone else on the deck."
Once someone disembarks the ship, the number of potential interactions can grow quite quickly. This is why officials were concerned when a KLM flight attendant fell ill after being aboard a flight with one of the infected cruise ship passengers. Fortunately, the flight attendant ultimately tested negative for hantavirus.
Titanji is heartened by what she's seen playing out so far. "It seems like the international collaborative effort has been really robust and the mechanisms for containment are in place and underway," she says.
Public health officials argue that contact tracing is a powerful approach that will reduce further spread. "We can break this chain of transmission," said Abdi Mahmoud, the director of the World Health Organization's health emergency alert and response efforts, at a press conference on Thursday.
He has good reason to be confident. Contact tracing was vital during the fight against COVID-19 and helped end the Ebola crisis in Liberia, containing the epidemic there more than a decade ago. Some of the contact tracing even involved hours-long hikes through the jungle to a remote village.
Authorities are hoping for similar success with this hantavirus outbreak.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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The sky above Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown will be dotted with color on Saturday with the annual Kite Festival.
The background: The festival had its beginnings as a joyful protest in 2021, back when a proposal for a Dodger Stadium gondola included cutting through the airspace above the park.
What to expect: This year’s programming includes a kite-making station where you can build your own flying art for a donation of $5, along with art workshops and the unveiling of a large floating, inflatable sculpture by Guatemalan kite artist Francisco Ramos.
The sky above Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown will be dotted with color Saturday with the annual Kite Festival.
Clockshop's Kite Festival
Los Angeles State Historic Park
Saturday from 2 to 6 p.m.
The festival had its beginnings as a joyful protest in 2021, back when a proposal for a Dodger Stadium gondola included cutting through the airspace above the park. Organizers say last year’s Kite Festival drew a crowd of about 7,000.
“The Kite Festival, [for] some people, it’s their favorite day in Los Angeles,” said Sue Bell Yank, executive director of Clockshop, the nonprofit arts org that runs the festival. “It’s the time when they really feel connected to their city. More so than any other time.”
This year’s programming includes a kite-making station where you can build your own flying art for a donation of $5, along with art workshops and the unveiling of a large floating, inflatable sculpture by Guatemalan kite artist Francisco Ramos.
