The story
Beirut Marathon in Beirut
Founded in 2003 by May El-Khalil as a project of post-civil-war reconciliation, the Beirut Marathon is Lebanon's flagship long-distance race, a 42.195-kilometer course through central Beirut and its corniche held on the last Sunday of November. It anchors a full weekend that also includes half marathon, 10K, 5K, para-athlete, and children's races organized by the Beirut Marathon Association.
May El-Khalil founded the Beirut Marathon in 2003 while still recovering from a near-fatal road accident that had left her in a coma and required years of surgery to walk again, and she built the race explicitly as a tool for national reconciliation in a country still raw from fifteen years of civil war.