The banks of the Ohio River as well as this famous Kentucky city’s downtown streets and parks are the setting for the Urban Bourbon Half Marathon, which makes its 10th annual running this year and features a finish line along Louisville’s Liberty Street, just down from the Jim Beam Urban Stillhouse.
Starts near the convention center downtown. Organized by the Louisville Sports Commission, the same race organization that stages the annual Kentucky Derby Festival Marathon and Mini Marathon here the week before the “most famous two minutes in sports,” the half marathon starts along Main Street, between 6th Street and 5th Street, near the Kentucky Science Center and the Muhammad Ali Center.
After turns on Chestnut Street and Lexington Road, the course then crosses over a bridge and into the eastern part of the city, where the next stretch of the course takes runners along the edges of Cave Hill National Cemetery, whose history dates all the way back to the early 1860s.
Runners next head east along Lexington Road into Louisville’s Cherokee Park, where runners will make their way along nearly two miles of the park’s Scenic Loop, which has separate lanes for cars and walkers, runners and bikers.