Malaga Marathon 2026: Kenyan Champions Smash Records Kenyan runners Simon Njuguna and Rebecca Kangogo win the Malaga Marathon 2026 with a women's course record, as Jorge Blanco takes the half marathon in record time. region: Malaga | category: Sports Malaga spent Sunday morning running, and the city's biggest race of the autumn produced a clean sweep and two records. The Generali Maraton de Malaga, which this year brought its date forward into early November, started at half past eight from the Paseo del Parque with two distances on the start line, the full 42 kilometres and the half marathon, and by midday the story had a clear shape: Kenyan champions, a women's course record and a Spanish winner in the half race who also broke the tape in record style. The men's marathon went to Simon Njuguna, the Kenyan runner who has made Spanish roads his speciality in recent seasons, and the women's race to his compatriot Rebecca Kangogo, whose winning performance set a new record for the women's field. Local coverage of the finish described a heart-stopping closing stretch, with the outcome uncertain deep into the final kilometres, and the women's record coming at the end of a race run hard from the front. The half marathon added a storyline of its own, with the Spanish runner Jorge Blanco taking the win in a new course record time and giving the local crowd a home name to celebrate. Sunday's running was the visible half of months of planning, because a marathon through the centre of Malaga is also a citywide operation to move everyone who is not running it. The Paseo del Parque, the green spine of the city where both races started, was closed from eight in the evening on Saturday until six in the evening on Sunday to allow the assembly and the dismantling of the start and finish infrastructure. During the race, closures rolled across the city in timed bands: the Alameda Principal, the Avenida de Andalucia and the Avenida de la Aurora went first, and the loops closed progressively until the centre's most emblematic streets, including Calle Larios and the Plaza de la Constitucion, reopened early in the afternoon for pedestrians and a Sunday that belongs to terraces as much as to finish lines. Public transport carried its share of the puzzle. EMT bus lines that normally serve the Paseo del Parque ran on modified routes in both directions from Saturday night until the end of the event, with stops on the promenade suspended and alternative stops on the Alameda. The municipal car parks of La Marina, Camas, Andalucia, El Palo and Pio Baroja limited entries and exits during the morning, and the authorities recommended the ring roads, the MA-20 and the AP-7, to anyone crossing the city by car. The November date itself is part of the story. The decision to move the race away from the spring heat and into the sharper, faster air of late autumn was aimed squarely at performance and comfort, and on the evidence of Sunday it delivered: records on the marathon course and on the half distance in a single morning, under conditions that let the elite fields race hard from the gun and let the thousands behind them run without flirting with heat exhaustion. For the amateur majority, the appeal of the Malaga race has always been the combination: a fast, sea-level urban course that strings together the Alameda, the port, the Pedregaleco promenade and city streets, with a finish among the palms of the Paseo del Parque. Runners who want a December in the sun already know the arithmetic, because with the November date the race has quietly become the last big city marathon of the Spanish autumn. The weekend closed with the practical questions already half answered. Results and classifications were published through the afternoon for both distances, the roads returned to the city in stages, and the buses went back to their usual lines by evening. What remains is the balance: two Kenyan champions, two records, one Spanish half-marathon winner in a class of his own, and a city that ran twenty-six point two miles through its own front room without quite closing the front door.