Newport Marathon & Half Marathon

Start at Yaquina Bay State Park. You’ll start the race on the grounds of this state park that sits at the northern end of Yaquina Bay, where the bay meets the Pacific Ocean. This is where you’ll get to take in the park’s famous lighthouse, which was built in 1871 and has served over the years as a lighthouse, a barracks for construction workers building a nearby jetty, and today is open to the public. It’s long been rumored to be haunted, as the United States Lighthouse Society notes in this piece on the Yaquina Bay lighthouse: Abandoned and neglected as the years passed, the lighthouse developed a ghostly appearance. It also picked up some ghostly legends to match its look. An 1899 article by Lischen M. Miller in the Pacific Monthly helped the rumors along. “Of an afternoon when the fog comes drifting in from the sea,” she wrote, “and completely envelopes the lighthouse, and then stops in its course as if its object had been attained, it is the loneliest place in the world. At such times those who chance to be in the vicinity hear a moaning sound like the cry of one in pain, and sometimes a frenzied call for help pierces the death-like stillness of the waning day.” From there, you’ll head north and run through some of Newport’s residential neighborhoods, stretches that feature only gentle hills — most of the course, organizers note, is very flat thanks to its location at just over 60 feet above sea level. Run along the Yaquina River. Once you make it around the first three-mile loop and back into Yaquina Bay State Park, next you’ll head onto South Naterlin Drive and then onto Southeast Bay Boulevard, beginning a long stretch that unfolds along the banks of the Yaquina River. You’ll follow this part of the course as it snakes along the riverside for the next 5-plus miles, passing by the Hatfield Marine Science Center across the river and the river estuary between miles 6 and 8. At about the mile 8.7 point, you’ve reached the turnaround point, and then will head back along the route you’ve just run in reverse, all the way back to the finish line near Embarcadero Center, where Southeast Moore Drive meets Southeast Bay Boulevard. Marathon course is a Boston qualifier. Organizers note that the full marathon course is a USATF-sanctioned course, and is a qualifying course for both the Boston Marathon and the Olympic Marathon Trials.