60th Annual Equinox Marathon crowns new and past champion

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) - The 60th annual Equinox Marathon and Half Marathon took place Saturday morning as hundreds of runners came to the premier running event for Interior Alaska.

The major hurdle for most runners on the trails of the challenging course was the climb up the feared Ester Dome.

Runners set a blistering pace with the men’s winner Zack Bursell, who was running the marathon for the first time, taking the win for the men’s division with an unofficial time of 2 hours 57 minutes and 7 seconds.

“Yeah I really like the hills, the steep up, the steep down. I on the flat sections, I don’t do quite as well, so I knew I just had to like make it to the big climb, and once we got there I was pretty confident that I could make a move and make people hurt. So yeah, just try to stick to what I feel like I’m comfortable with,” said Zack Bursell, the 2023 Men’s Equinox Marathon winner.

For the women’s division Christy Marvin would take her seventh Equinox Marathon victory home with an unofficial time of 3 hours 19 minutes and 52 seconds.

“You know this time, I really tried to run the first half a lot more conservatively. I had some issues with injury and a little bit of illness coming into this race this time. So I started out a lot more conservatively than I normally do, and I felt actually a lot better than I expected. I really didn’t know if I could pull off another win. Shalane and I ran together the first 10 or 12 miles, which was really great and fun to have her there. But I really didn’t know how my body would hold up, just given some of the hiccups that I had in my training,” said Christy Marvin, the 2023 Women’s Equinox Marathon winner.

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