Southernmost Marathon & Runners Festival Weekend

Course highlights

The out-and-back course start near the western end of the island, at the Rum Barrel Bar & Restaurant at Front Street and Simonton Street. From there, the half marathoners and the full marathoners will follow the same course for roughly the first 7 1/2 miles, heading around the western and southern edges of the island to U.S. 1. The first few miles of the race — which is virtually all flat throughout, and never higher than a few feet above sea level — take runners through Key West’s Old Town neighborhood, where most of the tourist attractions and signature Key West-style architecture can be found, everything from restored wooden homes with lush tropical trees and plants growing outside to the Ernest Hemingway House, where the legendary author lived throughout most of the 1930s. Runners will trek out to the Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park in the first two miles, where they’ll get a look at this Civil War-era fort and an 1860s-era African Burial Ground, believed to be a cemetery for African refugees, and the only one of its kind anywhere in the U.S. After that out-and-back stretch, runners make their way east back to Whitehead Street, where they’ll turn right and head south to the actual location of the Southernmost Point of the continental U.S., a giant red, black and yellow bullet-shaped landmark that’s pretty impossible to miss. Next, the course heads to Higgs Beach and then to South Roosevelt Boulevard, which will take runners for the next few miles to the turnaround point at the intersection with U.S. 1. Once they make the turnaround, runners retrace their steps back onto South Roosevelt and go back the way they just came from. They’ll continue the same path all the way back to Whitehead Street — this time, skipping the out-and-back out to Fort Taylor — to the finish line back at the Rum Barrel on Front Street.