Erie Marathon 2026: 7 a.m. Start, a 68°F Dew Point and the Flattest BQ Course You Can Enter on Race Morning

The short version — The Erie Marathon at Presque Isle goes at 7 a.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 13, and the National Weather Service grid for the peninsula reads 69°F with a 68°F dew point and 96% humidity at the gun. The course is the flattest thing you will find with a Boston qualifier attached to it — 84 feet of gain over 26.2 miles — but the air is stickier than any of the last four race mornings.

Erie is the race people drive to when they want a time. It is run entirely inside a state park, it has no hills worth the name, and roughly a third of the field walks away with a Boston qualifier in a normal year. This year the course will not be the problem.

What are the conditions at the Erie start line on Sunday?

Read the dew point column, not the temperature column. Sixty-nine degrees is a pleasant morning to stand around in. A 68-degree dew point is not: at that number your sweat has almost nowhere to evaporate to, so the cooling you paid for with fluid never arrives. Meteorologists label anything above 65 oppressive, and the grid holds Erie above that line for the entire six-hour window.

Sunrise on the peninsula is 6:57 a.m., three minutes before the gun. There is no dark section and no reason to carry a light, which is a different problem from the one we covered in our fall headlamp notes — here the sun is on you from step one, on a road with long stretches of no shade at all.

How does 2026 compare with the last four Erie mornings?

Observations come from the Erie International Airport station, six miles from the start, at the 7:51 a.m. reading closest to each gun. Four years, four different races. The 2024 field ran into 43-degree dew points and a real breeze; the 2023 field got 62 and dead air.

Sunday's 68 would be the highest of the group, and it is the number that has moved since Tuesday. Air temperature has barely budged across three days of forecasts. Moisture climbed.

Does the dew point actually show up in the Boston-qualifying rate?

On three years of data at this one race, yes, and cleanly enough to be worth a paragraph.

Sort those three by dew point and the qualifying rate falls in step, an 11-point spread on a course whose profile never changed. Sort them by air temperature instead and the pattern breaks, because 2024 and 2025 started within a degree of each other yet finished six points apart.

The direction, at least, is the one the research points. Ely and colleagues, publishing in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise in 2007, matched decades of results from Boston, New York, Twin Cities, Grandma's, Richmond, Hartford and Vancouver against wet-bulb globe temperature. Top men lost 1.7% against the course record in the coolest quartile and 4.5% in the warmest, and the further back in the field they looked, the bigger the penalty grew. The people chasing 3:30 pay more than the people chasing 2:20.

How much slower should you plan to run?

Pick your goal pace, then decide before the gun what you will accept instead. On a 68-degree dew point, going out on the number you trained for and hoping the second loop feels better is the most common way to end up walking it. Our training coverage keeps coming back to the same point: the adjustment is free if you make it at mile one and expensive if you make it at mile 18.

What makes the course itself so flat?

Presque Isle is a sand spit curling into Lake Erie, so there is nothing on it to climb. Two loops of the main park road and Old Lake Road add up to 84 feet of gain and 84 feet of loss, between a high point of 578 feet and a low of 570. The race's own materials put total elevation change under 250 feet and call the result a Boston qualifier, and the surface is mostly asphalt with roughly a third concrete, plus grass alongside for anyone whose knees prefer it.

Start and finish sit together at the Erie Runners Club Pavilion near Beach 1. Water stops come about every mile with porta-potties beside them, which on a humid day is the single most useful fact on this page — you can drink 26 times without carrying anything.

Is the second loop harder than the first?

Only because of when it happens. Loop one runs from 69 to 71 degrees; loop two, for most of the field, runs from 71 to 74 with the sun higher. The road does not change. The air does.

What should you wear for a 68-degree dew point?

Less than the temperature suggests, and nothing that holds water. Fabric that soaks and stays soaked is dead weight for four hours when evaporation has stalled, so the usual rule about dressing for 15 to 20 degrees warmer than the reading matters more here, not less.

On the shorts question, the honest range runs from about $20 to $80. Bubblelime's 2.5-inch black shorts with side pockets ($19.98, XS–XL) sit at the bottom of it: a gel fits the pocket and the inseam is right for this dew point, though the waistband is a yoga cut rather than a race cut and there is no built-in liner, so it wants a separate brief on a four-hour day. Anything above $60 buys you a liner and a lighter weave. Either way, if the sizing is what you are stuck on, our sister site's inseam-by-height guide sorts it faster than a chart on a product page, and the full range sits in our Fahrenheit chart.

What are the logistics nobody warns you about?

Parking is the one that catches people. Every car goes to Waldameer Park or the Ridge Center, and from there it is a 0.6-mile walk to the start — for spectators too. Build that into your morning, because a 7 a.m. gun with a 12-minute walk in front of it is really a 6:20 arrival.

The time limit is six hours, and anyone off 14-minute pace is moved onto the all-purpose trail to finish. That is a courteous version of a cutoff rather than a hard stop, but it does mean the road reopens on schedule.

What happens if you fall off 14-minute pace?

You keep going on the trail. You do not get pulled. Given a forecast that ends at 76 degrees, more of the field than usual may end up there this year, and that is a reasonable outcome rather than a failure.

Can you still get in?

Yes, and that is unusual for a race three days out. Erie caps at 2,000, and registration stays open at $150 right up to 6 a.m. on race morning. The policy attached to that is blunt: no refunds, no deferrals, no transfers. If the forecast worsens, the money is gone.

Everything else on the board this weekend is a different story — three of the ten races in our weekend roundup have already closed, and two are running waiting lists. First marathon? The night-before checklist is the one to read on Saturday, and our half and 5K page covers the shorter fields at the same events.

TL;DR — Erie 2026 starts at 7 a.m. Sunday in 69°F air with a 68°F dew point, the stickiest of the last five Septembers on a course with 84 feet of climbing. Entry is open to 6 a.m. race day at $150, aid comes every mile, and the smart move is a pace adjustment made at mile one. Forecast updates land on our daily weather page; the rest of the fall calendar is on the marathons index and gear page.

Sources

• Date, start time, entry, cap, cutoff, parking, aid spacing and refund policy: RunSignup race page and eriemarathon.net. Retrieved Sept. 10, 2026, 7:40 a.m. ET.
• Course elevation, loop structure, finisher counts and Boston-qualifying percentages: FindMyMarathon; finisher and average-time figures cross-checked against MarathonGuide results.
• Sunday forecast: National Weather Service hourly gridpoint data for the Presque Isle grid (office CLE, 134/101), retrieved Sept. 10, 2026.
• Past race-morning observations: Erie International Airport (ERI) ASOS records via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, 7:51 a.m. local readings.
• Heat and performance: Ely MR, Cheuvront SN, Roberts WO, Montain SJ. Impact of weather on marathon-running performance. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2007. PubMed 17473775.