Since 2011
Fifteen years of running on roads with memory
Every great race is really a story about a road.
Ours begins in 2011, when three distance runners — Abraham Kosgei of Kenya, Joseph Karnes, and Antonio Lopez — stood at historic Fort Marcy in the heart of Santa Fe and imagined a race that would carry runners the way this land has always carried its people: north along the Old Taos Highway, past the Santa Fe Opera and Camel Rock, through the Village of Tesuque and the lands of Tesuque Pueblo, down 1,300 feet into the Rio Grande Valley to Buffalo Thunder in the Pueblo of Pojoaque. Ancestors ran and walked that route for centuries. For nearly a decade, so did we — up to 1,600 of us at a time, to the sound of African drums at the start line, making it one of the most beloved running events in Northern New Mexico.
That was the first lesson this race ever taught: in Santa Fe, you don’t build a course. You borrow one — from the Pueblos, from the traders, from the runners who came before.
In 2019, a new chapter began quietly, the way most true things do: a small sunrise run on a foothill trail. No expo, no arch, no crowd. Just runners, thin air, and first light on the Sangre de Cristos. That morning run became the Santa Fe International Half Marathon — reborn under Mwangaza Athletics Club, the Swahili word for enlightenment.
The world stopped in 2020. We came back. In 2022, we honored Indigenous Peoples’ Day by running the classic route one more time — Fort Marcy to Buffalo Thunder, the full descent into the valley — a bridge between the race’s first life and its next one.
Then we turned south to the Old Las Vegas Highway — the original alignment of Route 66, and before that, the final approach of the Santa Fe Trail, where wagon caravans from Missouri made their last push into the city. In 2024 we unveiled a certified descent from La Tienda Plaza in Eldorado to the Santa Fe Railyard, and more than 700 runners from 15 states came to run the Mother Road. By our fourth annual in 2025, with Capitol Ford as our title sponsor, the race had grown into a three-day festival of racing, wellness, and culture — runners from 47 states, drums at dawn, custom-made medals in tired hands.
And now, for our fifth annual, the story arrives where it was always headed.
We run the river.
The Santa Fe River is the reason this city exists. For more than 400 years it connected communities along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro — the royal road from Mexico City, the oldest European trade route in North America — and for thousands of years before that, it sustained the Pueblo peoples of this valley. By 2007 it had been named America’s Most Endangered River: dammed, dry, forgotten. Then this community did something remarkable. Neighbors knocked on doors for easements. The city and county rebuilt the channel with native willows and cottonwoods instead of concrete. An ordinance now releases living water down the riverbed each year. Mile by mile, Santa Fe brought its river back to life.
On September 20, 2026, we run that resurrection. At 7:30 in the morning, the long call of an African kudu horn will rise over Romero’s Park on historic Agua Fría — a village older than the United States, named for the cold water itself — and send runners onto a course that rolls through an opening loop of high-desert farmland, then climbs the river corridor toward the city, turning at 6,883 feet before flowing back down to the finish at Reunity Resources Farm. Not a course borrowed from conquest or commerce this time, but from restoration. Every stride traces a waterway that a community refused to let die.
And that is why this course, of all courses, is ours. Because this race has always run for water. Proceeds support the Kitany Water Project and youth and meal programs in Coach Kosgei’s home village of Matunget, in Kenya’s Rift Valley — where some of the greatest distance runners on earth learned to run beside their own rivers. A runner tracing a rescued river in New Mexico helps a child drink clean water in Elgeyo-Marakwet. One river answers another, across two continents.
The call of the kudu horn still sends runners off, and the drums still carry the morning. Kids still dye T-shirts indigo with master artist Gasali Adeyemo. Every finisher — half marathon, relay and 5K alike — earns the same hand-thrown ceramic medal, and the top three in every age group take home hand-made medallions crafted by Native and Indigenous artists, honoring the peoples whose lands and waterways this race has always run through. The 3-Amigos Relay still passes its sash. The 5K brings whole families out to the farm, and the free Kids 1K Dash fills Railyard Park downtown the afternoon before.
Fifteen years. Four courses.
Two continents.
One current running through it all.
This year, we run the river. Come run it with us.