The Maine Agenda › Outdoors in Maine
TD Beach to Beacon 10K 2026: A Local's Guide to Running and Watching Maine's Best Race
At eight o'clock on the first Saturday in August, a stretch of Route 77 that is usually somebody's quiet commute past the salt marsh becomes the most famous six miles in New England. About sixty-five hundred people stand on the closed road beside Crescent Beach, close enough to the water to smell the low tide, and wait for a gun. Most of them will never win anything, and they did not come to. They came because for one morning a year, running a road in Cape Elizabeth makes you part of something the state has been doing for almost three decades, and because the race ends in front of a lighthouse.
That race is the TD Beach to Beacon 10K, and the 28th edition ran on Saturday, August 1, 2026. It is the best road race in Maine and one of the best 10Ks in the country, and it sells out in a day, which means most people reading this are either looking for what happened or planning for next year. This guide covers both: the 2026 results, the course, the logistics pattern that repeats every August, where to stand if you are spectating, and how to actually get a bib in 2027.
The 2026 results
Habtom Samuel of Eritrea won the men's race in 27:40, running his first Beach to Beacon and pulling away from Patrick Kiprop, who had led most of the way and finished eight seconds back. Samuel had said before the race that he wanted the course record and the win; he got the second one. Pamela Kosgei of Kenya took the women's race in 31:51 in what was her first road race of any kind, after winning the 10,000 meters for the University of New Mexico in 2025.
Miguel Jimenez-Vergara won the men's wheelchair division in 22:36 and Hoda Elshorbagy the women's in 26:25. The Maine titles went to Ruth White of Orono at 34:05, her third, and Alec Troxell of Portland at 29:15.
These are the leaders as reported by the Portland Press Herald from the finish line on Saturday morning, in a story that carried an update note, so treat the placings below the top few as provisional until the official file settles.
Where to find your own time, and an honest note about it. The race publishes results at beach2beacon.org/post-race/results, but that page does not actually contain any results. It contains two embedded Race Roster widgets, one a results calendar and one a participant search, and neither renders to anything a search engine or a plain browser request can read. The page's own last-modified stamp was July 23, more than a week before the race. If you are hunting for a friend's time and the page looks empty, that is the widget failing to load, not the results being missing. Load it in a browser with scripts enabled and search the participant widget by name.
Two calls from this guide's pre-race version, scored honestly. We wrote that the women's race was the open one, since none of the 2025 top three returned, and named Kosgei as the runner to know. That held. We also called Kiprop the clear headliner on the men's side. He was second.
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What the Beach to Beacon actually is
Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Cape Elizabeth native who won the first women's Olympic marathon in 1984, founded the race in 1998 as the People's Beach to Beacon: a world-class 10K on the coastal roads she grew up running, with proceeds going to a Maine children's charity each year. With TD Bank as title sponsor and Boston Marathon race director Dave McGillivray running the operation, it pulls a genuine international elite field and real prize money while still feeling like a town event. The 2026 beneficiary was Dirigo Reads, a Maine children's literacy nonprofit.
The numbers tell the story of how hard it is to get in. For 2026, organizers capped general entry at 6,000 bibs and set aside another 600 for Cape Elizabeth residents. The resident bibs were gone in about two hours and general registration sold out within a day. The race draws close to 6,500 runners and runs on more than 800 volunteers, which makes it the largest road race in Maine and one where demand behaves more like a major marathon than a local 10K.
The course: fast, coastal, and built for a great finish
The Beach to Beacon is point to point, which is part of why it runs fast. You start near Crescent Beach State Park on Route 77, head north, and bear right early onto Old Ocean House Road, a narrow lane that rejoins Route 77 before the route runs through Smugglers Cove and drops you into Fort Williams Park. The published elevation numbers explain the times: you start at 50 feet above sea level and finish at 25, the high point across the 6.2 miles is 100 feet and the low is 20. Nothing here deserves to be called a hill. What the course has instead is a net downhill and a quick opening mile, a combination that flatters a disciplined runner and punishes an excited one.
Then there is the finish, which is the reason people fly in for this. You come into Fort Williams Park and cross the line in the shadow of Portland Head Light, with Casco Bay over your shoulder. There is no better closing quarter-mile in the region, and it is worth running the whole thing a hair conservatively just to be able to look up and take it in. If the lighthouse is the only Maine landmark you see all trip, our guide to Portland Head Light and the Cape Elizabeth lighthouses explains why it earns the hype.
Race-day logistics, the part that actually trips people up
The operational shape barely changes year to year, so what follows is the verified 2026 pattern, which is the right thing to plan a 2027 morning around until the race publishes its updated pages the following July.
There is no runner parking at the finish. Fort Williams is reserved for sponsors, press, volunteers, staff, and a small number of spectators. Everyone else parks at one of three satellite lots and rides a shuttle to the start. In 2026 the lots were Cape Elizabeth High School at 343 Ocean House Road, Hannaford Corporate Headquarters at 145 Pleasant Hill Road in Scarborough, and South Portland High School at 637 Highland Avenue, all first come, first served. Pre-race shuttles ran 6:00 to 7:15am, which makes the practical cutoff being parked and on a bus by 6:30.
The 2026 start sequence was the wheelchair division at 7:50am, the professional women at 8:00, and the professional men and the mass 10K field together at 8:12. If you are in the mass field, 8:00 is not your gun, and that catches out more first-timers than any other detail on this page.
Coming back is the part people forget to plan. Post-race shuttles run from Fort Williams between 9:00 and 11:00am, carry spectators as well as runners, and return to the three satellite lots and to the Sprague Fields lots on Charles E. Jordan Road. You must be on a bus by 11:00am. There is no shuttle from the start line to the finish, so if a friend drops you at the start, they cannot ride to Fort Williams with you.
The bike valet is the best option if you live close enough. It is free and open to spectators and volunteers as well as runners, ran 5:30am to 11:15am in 2026, and there is no gear check at all. The valet-to-start shuttle runs only for runners who RSVPed in advance, and you must be on it by 6:45am.
One durable warning about the source rather than the race. Through July 2026 the organizer's own pages disagreed with each other on the wheelchair start, 7:50am on the schedule page against 7:55am on the general information page, and earlier in the month they disagreed on the bike valet closing time too. Both times the newer, more operational page was right. When two beach2beacon.org pages conflict, take the schedule and parking pages over the general information page, and check the modified date before you believe either.
The road closures, segment by segment
These matter to every Cape Elizabeth household whether or not anyone is running, and they are not one blanket window. They repeat with very little change from year to year. The 2026 closures were:
- Route 77, Sprague Hall to Kettle Cove Road: 6:00 to 10:00am
- Scott Dyer Road eastbound: 6:45 to 8:00am
- Fowler Road, all of it except shuttle buses: 7:15 to 10:00am
- Route 77, Kettle Cove Road to Old Ocean House Road: 7:30 to 10:00am
- Route 77 at Hillway: 7:30 to 10:00am
- Old Ocean House Road, all of it: 7:30 to 10:00am
- Crescent Beach State Park: 7:30 to 8:30am
- Shore Road south of Fort Williams: 7:30 to 11:00am
The one that catches people out is Shore Road south of Fort Williams, which stays shut until 11:00am, an hour after most of the others reopen. If your morning involves getting to Portland Head Light or anywhere past the park from the south, you are not driving it before eleven.
Friday night is the underrated half of the weekend
Almost nobody outside the race's own mailing list knows that Beach to Beacon is a two-day event. The Friday evening before the race, at Fort Williams, is the half a local can actually walk into: three events, free to watch, in the same spot where Saturday's race finishes. The shape repeats with very little change year to year.
The Kids' Fun Run goes at 4:00pm for kids twelve and under, laps of the field grouped by age, from half a lap for the four-and-unders to four laps at eleven and twelve. It has the lowest barrier of the whole weekend: on-site registration and packet pickup both open at 3:00pm at the kids' start line, so a parent can decide that afternoon and still get a kid a number. The Beacon Walk, Run and Roll follows at 5:30pm, just under half a mile along the oceanfront, fully accessible and open to all abilities, with a shirt and a finisher's medal for everyone who does it, packet pickup from 4:30pm.
The High School Mile closes the evening: girls at 6:30pm, boys at 6:45, a para heat at 7:00. You watch this one rather than enter it. It is a twenty-per-gender invitational for Maine high schoolers picked on verified seed times against a real standard, 5:00 in the 1600 for boys and 6:15 for girls, with applications closing about ten days out. If you want to see the next generation of Maine distance runners, this is the best half hour of the weekend and nobody is fighting you for a view.
The elite field, and why the times here are fast
The professional race is the part most local spectators walk past without realizing what they are looking at. The 2026 roster competed for more than $90,000, with $10,000 to each of the open winners, awards down to tenth, and a separate $23,000 American purse from Dunkin. The race also pays out in Masters, Maine and wheelchair categories, which is why the Maine title is a real title and not a participation ribbon.
The detail worth carrying to the roadside next year: this course makes people fast. Four returning athletes set personal bests in Cape Elizabeth in 2025, including Patrick Dever at 27:44, Graydon Morris at 27:57, Joe Klecker at 28:11 and Molly Born at 31:55. When the leaders come past you on Route 77, you are watching a field that has good reason to believe it can run its best time of the year on this road.
If you are spectating: where to stand
The finish at Fort Williams is the showstopper, with the lighthouse backdrop and the celebration on the lawn, but spectator access is limited and fills early: a friend dropping a runner at the start can only park there if they arrive before 7:30am and spaces remain. The smarter local move is to skip the parking puzzle and pick a spot along Route 77 or near Old Ocean House Road that you can walk or bike to. You lose the lighthouse photo and gain a front-row seat to the whole 6,500-runner field with zero logistics. The start is also a short walk from Crescent Beach, one of the better swimming beaches south of the city, covered in our roundup of the best beaches near Portland.
If you cannot be there at all, do not count on video. The race live streamed its finish line for the first time in 2025 and announced that stream in a news release dated July 23, nine days out. In 2026 no streaming announcement of any kind appeared, right through race morning. One year is not a tradition, so plan on following results and treat a stream as a bonus if it reappears.
How to run it in 2027
The plan for anyone who missed 2026 starts in April, not August. General registration opens in mid-April and historically sells out within a day, so set a calendar reminder for early April and have your race account and payment ready before entry opens. The Cape Elizabeth resident allotment of 600 bibs opens a day earlier and goes faster still. The 2026 dates were announced in a race news release on February 25, so the announcement lands about seven weeks before entry opens.
The race is held on the first Saturday in August every year, which puts 2027 on August 7. Treat that as arithmetic rather than as an announced date: the race publishes its own dates each winter, we watch that news page rather than a secondhand roundup, and the confirmed date goes into this guide the day it appears.
Two side doors open in the spring and close before summer. The charity-bib route runs through the year's named beneficiary on a fundraising deadline that passed at the end of June in 2026, and the official runner-to-runner transfer window closed at the start of July. If neither is open by the time you read this, the answer is next year, not a bib bought from a stranger, which gets people disqualified and banned.
What stays open latest is volunteering, and it is the underrated way in. More than 800 people work this race, sign-up runs into race week while crews are still being filled, and it is the only route to the inside of race morning that does not require beating a registration clock in April.
A note on whether this should be your first 10K
Honesty is the point of this site, so here it is. The Beach to Beacon is a wonderful race and a hard place to learn how to race. A field of sixty-five hundred, a fast opening downhill that punishes an over-eager start, and a finish you will want to enjoy rather than survive all argue for having a season of fitness behind you. If you have never pinned on a number, do not make this your debut. Run a couple of low-key summer 5Ks first. Our guide to where to run in Greater Portland lays out the routes and run clubs, and the regional racing calendar is in our guide to the competitive summer in Greater Portland. If the sellout beat you, the Maine Marathon and Half Marathon on October 4 stays open into race weekend and is the natural fall target. And if it was the charity-bib idea that appealed to you, the region's give-back-through-sport scene runs well beyond the roads, including the charity golf circuit that quietly raises millions every summer.
FAQ
Who won the 2026 TD Beach to Beacon 10K?
Habtom Samuel of Eritrea won the men's race in 27:40, eight seconds ahead of Patrick Kiprop, and Pamela Kosgei of Kenya won the women's race in 31:51 in her first road race. Miguel Jimenez-Vergara took the men's wheelchair division in 22:36 and Hoda Elshorbagy the women's in 26:25. Ruth White of Orono won the Maine women's title in 34:05 and Alec Troxell of Portland the Maine men's title in 29:15.
Where do I find my Beach to Beacon results?
Results live at beach2beacon.org/post-race/results, but the page itself contains no result text. It embeds two Race Roster widgets, a results calendar and a participant search, so you need a browser with scripts enabled to see anything at all. A blank-looking page means the widget did not load, not that results are unavailable. Search the participant widget by runner name.
When is the TD Beach to Beacon 10K?
The race is held on the first Saturday of August every year in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, which puts 2027 on August 7, though the race announces its own dates each winter and that announcement is the one to trust. In 2026 the start sequence was the wheelchair division at 7:50am, the professional women at 8:00am, and the professional men and the mass 10K field together at 8:12am, with the awards ceremony at 10:00am.
How do I get into the Beach to Beacon, and does it sell out?
It sells out within a day. General registration opens in mid-April, the 600-bib Cape Elizabeth resident allotment opens a day earlier and goes faster, and the dates are announced in a race news release around late February. The two later routes, a charity bib through the year's named beneficiary and the official runner-to-runner transfer window, both close before July. Never buy a bib outside the official process; bandit running leads to disqualification.
Where do I park for the Beach to Beacon, and is there a shuttle?
There is no runner parking at the Fort Williams finish. The three 2026 satellite lots were Cape Elizabeth High School at 343 Ocean House Road, Hannaford Corporate Headquarters at 145 Pleasant Hill Road in Scarborough, and South Portland High School at 637 Highland Avenue, all first come, first served, and the lot list has been stable. Shuttles run from all three lots from 6:00 to 7:15am before the race and from 9:00 to 11:00am after, and the return buses carry spectators as well as runners. Plan to be parked and on a bus by 6:30am, and be on a return bus by 11:00am.
Which roads close for the Beach to Beacon, and when?
Route 77 from Sprague Hall to Kettle Cove Road closes 6:00 to 10:00am. Scott Dyer Road eastbound closes 6:45 to 8:00am, and all of Fowler Road except shuttle buses closes 7:15 to 10:00am. From 7:30 to 10:00am, Route 77 from Kettle Cove Road to Old Ocean House Road, Route 77 at Hillway, and all of Old Ocean House Road close. Crescent Beach State Park closes 7:30 to 8:30am. Shore Road south of Fort Williams stays closed until 11:00am, the latest reopening of the set.
What is the Beach to Beacon course like?
It is a fast, point-to-point 10K that starts near Crescent Beach State Park on Route 77, runs the rolling coastal roads of Cape Elizabeth, and finishes inside Fort Williams Park beside Portland Head Light. The opening is flat with a slight downhill, the middle miles roll gently, and the highest point is only about 100 feet above sea level. The lighthouse finish is one of the best in the sport.