Spartathlon: how finishers pace the course, by finish-time band

Four bands, not an even grid of hours

The official 2026 finish table has 276 finish-time entries (the #racefinishers panel), out of 403 entries in the athlete panel (#raceathletes). The article splits those 276 into four official finish-time bands: under 28 hours (n=33), 28h-32h (n=61), 32h-34h (n=57) and 34h and up (n=125).

The boundaries are not an even 4-hour grid (24/28/32/36): the field is heavily loaded toward the 36-hour finish cut-off, so an even grid would leave the fastest band with fewer than 15 finishers. The 28/32/34-hour boundaries were chosen so every band has at least 15 finishers.

Each runner’s band and finish time come from the official finish table. The elapsed times at the checkpoints (Corinth Canal, Ancient Nemea, Sterna, Nestani, Tegea) come from the live-timing snapshot taken on 27/9/2026 at 19:12, not from a final official source.

Under 28 hours: the fastest core

The 33 finishers in the fastest band had a median elapsed time of 6:43:06 at the Corinth Canal (km 79.8), 10:50:04 at Ancient Nemea (km 122.7), 12:57:55 at Sterna (km 142.6), 16:46:20 at Nestani (km 170.4) and 19:13:41 at Tegea (km 193.9), ahead of their finish time (median 26:03:44).

The gap to the slowest band (34h and up) starts small and widens as the race goes on: at the Corinth Canal the two medians were 1:49:35 apart, by Tegea that had grown to 7:38:51.

28h-34h: the two middle bands

In the 28h-32h band (n=61) median progress was 7:38:43 at the Corinth Canal, 12:31:43 at Ancient Nemea, 15:06:56 at Sterna, 19:43:01 at Nestani (n=59) and 23:07:23 at Tegea, finishing in a median 30:22:52.

In the 32h-34h band (n=57): 8:10:48 at the Corinth Canal, 13:31:27 at Ancient Nemea, 16:25:48 at Sterna, 21:22:46 at Nestani (n=56) and 25:14:53 at Tegea, finishing in a median 33:11:50. Where the n at a checkpoint is smaller than the band’s n, some runners have no recorded split there in the 27/9 snapshot.

34 hours and up: the largest band

The 34h-and-up band is the largest of the four, with 125 of the 276 finishers. Their median progress was 8:32:41 at the Corinth Canal, 14:27:18 at Ancient Nemea, 17:50:29 at Sterna, 23:22:54 at Nestani (n=122) and 26:52:32 at Tegea (n=124), finishing in a median 34:56:45.

At every checkpoint shown, the 34h-and-up band had the latest median recorded elapsed time of the four bands.

Where the time goes: share by section

Splitting the course into four sections (start→Corinth Canal, Corinth Canal→Ancient Nemea, Ancient Nemea→Tegea, the climbing section that includes the Sangas pass, and Tegea→Sparta), the climbing section’s share of total time was 32.6% in the fastest band, 35.1% and 35.6% in the two middle bands, and 35.3% in the slowest band (band medians).

The second-half:first-half ratio (split at Ancient Nemea, km 122.7, just 0.35 km past true half distance of the 244.7 km course) was 1.27x in the fastest band, 1.39x in the 28h-32h band, 1.45x in the 32h-34h band (the highest of the four) and 1.41x in the slowest band. In every band the second half took longer than the first.

Each individual runner’s four shares add up to exactly 100%, but a band’s medians do not always add up exactly, because the median is not additive; the gap here is small, up to about one percentage point per band.

DNF rows in the live snapshot

At the 27/9 19:12 live-timing snapshot, 104 rows had DNF status. Of these, 93 had a recorded Corinth Canal passage and 11 had no recorded passage there. A missing passage does not prove that those 11 stopped before the canal or identify a withdrawal location.

The median elapsed time at the Corinth Canal for the 93 rows with a recorded passage there was 8:31:35, about 21 minutes later than the median for the 276 finishers at the same point (8:10:58). The comparison covers only the Corinth Canal point at the 27/9 snapshot: it says nothing about when or why any of those 93 rows stopped.