Lake Benbrook Marathon Half Marathon & 5k
February 1, 2025
Benbrook
Road
1-100
Some Hills
Lakefront
High: 55°
/ Low: 31°
Overview
The serene waters of the Lake Benbrook reservoir, surrounded by rolling hills and prairie meadows just outside Fort Worth, are the setting for the Lake Benbrook Half Marathon & 5K, which marks its 38th annual running in 2024.
An out-and-back race with hills scattered throughout virtually the entire course, the event starts and finishes in Dutch Branch Park near the top of the lake, and takes runners on a course that offers ample views of the lake from several different vantage points.
Designed as a kind of practice/tuneup run for the Fort Worth Cowtown Marathon, which takes place just a month later, the Lake Benbrook race began life in the 1980s as a 20K race event, then called the Fort Worth Runners Club’s Fort Worth Fall Classic 20K.
The club became inactive for a few years, however, and the race wasn’t held again until 1990, when it was resurrected as a half-marathon organizers then named the “Better Half,” to distinguish it from Dallas’s “The Half” 13.1-mile race. Its name was changed again to the Lake Benbrook Half in 1993 when it was moved to the lake, and the rest is history.
Course Description
Thanks both to its terrain and the time of year the race is held, the conditions and the course can make for a challenging run — runners must navigate both the hills of the park areas surrounding Lake Benbrook as well as the event’s often cold, windy and sometimes rainy conditions.
Participants run on paved surfaces throughout the reservoir area’s parks, including Dutch Branch, Holiday Park and Mustang Park.
The starting time for runners in both the half marathon and the 5K race is 8:30 AM, and the starting location is the baseball facility just south of the YMCA, inside Dutch Branch Park. Participants can get to the park via either Interstate 20 or I-30 from nearby Fort Worth, by taking the exit for Highway 183 South and following it to Winscott Road.
