Belfast City Marathon 2024: The crowd of runners was so vast that it took 20 minutes to pass

First came the wheelchairs, and then a group of elite runners, several of them African.

And then came a trickle of runners, then a stream, and finally a deluge.

It took 20 full minutes for all the participants to pass, almost 10,000 of them (there were in fact around 18,000 runners in total, including 12,500 in relays, but in any one part of the route there were 8,000 runners – the 5,500 who were running the entire 26.2 mile distance and the 2,500 relay runners in each of the five sections).

This was the largest ever number of people to take part in a marathon in Northern Ireland’s capital city, and in the video (which will be attached to the web version of this story) you can see them at their peak between about the six and ten-minute mark in the footage. The image above is taken from the video at about six-and-a-half minutes.

From that stage in the film the crowd becomes so wide that it thronged the four-lane Newtownards Road, past Cabin Hill.

The density of runners is such that some of the participants begin to run on the pavements as the only way to get past those in front of them.

It is worth surfing through the video to see this sea of humanity on an early Sunday morning. In any city it would be a joyous sight, but in Belfast it is all the more remarkable as a sign of normal life in a once strife-torn location.

The 1982 marathon was the first, and it was one of the key milestones in the normalisation of Northern Ireland, and the toughest years of the Troubles – the 1970s.

By the beginning of the 80s the death toll from the violence was markedly lower than it had been in the worst days almost a decade earlier, and so life was returning to a Belfast that had become shuttered outside of business hours.

In 1980 the Grand Opera House re-opened, a major moment in the revitalisation of nightlife, and in 1982 the pizzeria Capers began to take in its first customers nearby. As we reported recently on its closure after 42 successful years, it was packed from the very first night and soon had to build an extension to cope with the demand.

That 1982 marathon had a mere 3,000 runners, a sixth of this year’s tally. But it was a thrilling event even so, particularly for a 10-year-old like me: I remember watching them pass along the Malone Road as one of the excited crowd lining the street and applauding them for their remarkable feat (it was almost unheard of for members of the general public to run a mammoth 26 miles without stopping).

I remember too the crowds at Maysfield Leisure centre, which – if I recall correctly – was both the finish and the start point.

Marathons had only recently come into vogue: the London race was launched the year before.

As Northern Ireland became increasingly peaceful and stable in the 1980s, albeit marred by terrible attacks and killings that lasted into the 1990s, so too did the marathon grow. By the late 1980s you would see a noticeable increase in people jogging on the roads in the early spring in preparation for the big day.

I remember in the mid 80s a neighbour from Bangor taking part, and seeing him being driven home, exhausted, by his wife at the end of the race.

But even so I wondered if marathon running would, like roller skating or indeed ice skating, become a 1980s fad.

It didn’t. It has become all the more massive.

It is wonderful to see the diversity of people taking part – of body size, of ethnicity, of ability levels. And it is particularly impressive to see people aged over 60 taking part.

I can’t be the only person who watches with a sense of admiration and also wistfulness. Completing a marathon was something I wanted to do in my life but I wonder if I ever now will. An old school pal of mine, who has run plenty of them, and in very respectable times of just over three hours, no longer does, because we are now at an age that gets easily injured!

There were 1,200 walkers yesterday, completing an eight-mile course. Maybe I will try that.

But what a day. Let’s hope that next year is all the more remarkable and large.

Ben Lowry is News Letter editor