Thames Path 100, 2026

Matt Gallagher won the Thames Path 100 in 15:39:32, finishing 1 hour 29 minutes 55 seconds clear of Sergey Ionov, who ran 17:09:27. That margin was 2.9 times the gap behind Ionov, where Guido Pastore took third in 17:40:45, a further 31 minutes 18 seconds back. Karla Borland won the women’s race in 17:21:56, with Zoe Smith second in 18:00:10.

The pace at the front did not reach the middle of the men’s race. The median man finished in 25:53:12, the slowest men’s median in any of the 14 editions run on this course since 2012. Gallagher’s winning time and that median sit more than half a day’s clock apart on the same results page, in a race where the leaders and the pack were effectively running different events.

More women finished than ever before, 43 of them, making up 21.5% of the field. At the front the two races have drifted apart over the same period: between 2012 and 2018 the gap between the men’s and women’s winners stood at 14.4%, and between 2019 and 2026 it has been 26.1%. With 200 finishers, this was the third largest race of its length in the United Kingdom this year, out of 24.

Below the podium, the difference between the men’s and women’s races largely disappears. The winners were separated by well over an hour, but the median woman came home in 26:51:35, less than an hour behind the median man. In the middle of the field, where most of these 200 runners finished, men and women were running close to the same race.

The chart below sets finishing time against age, in a field whose median finisher was 46.

The finishing times ran almost to the cutoff. The last finisher came in at 29:44:42, inside the 30:00:00 limit, and the last woman home finished in 29:38:25.