Guatemala Impact Marathon 2027

Overview Highlights Race Routes Schedule What's Included Blog Gallery Team The Impact FAQs

Sacatepequez , Guatemala

Guatemala Impact Marathon 2027

Empower the young leaders of a nation and run on a live volcano!

Overview

For six days, you live inside Guatemala, not just pass through it. You spend the week with our partners, SERES, as they train young people to lead on climate, food, and community projects in their own villages. You work alongside the team, eat together, hear what they’re building. By race morning, the names on your fundraising page are people you’ve shared coffee with. People standing on the start line beside you. The week closes on Pacaya, one of Guatemala’s active volcanoes. The race crosses lava fields, climbs through coffee farms, and tops out on a ridge by the crater. This is the model we’ve held for over a decade: small groups, local partners who lead the work, a trail race at the end of the week, and an Impact Ledger published after. Most people book Guatemala for the race. They tell their friends about the week.

Highlights

01 Community

02 Culture

03 Commerce

04 Challenge

01 Community

Our community partner in Guatemala is SERES, a youth-led, female-founded organisation training young Guatemalans and Salvadorans to lead on climate, food security, gender equality, and community resilience. They host you for two days inside their work. You walk through projects they designed and now run themselves: school gardens, community kitchens, climate education programmes. By race morning, the support isn’t abstract anymore. The people your fundraising supports are people you know. This is their work. We don’t arrive with a programme in a suitcase. We build the week around local organisations already leading in their own communities. That keeps the substance, loses the wall of text, and lands the methodology cleanly.

02 Culture

Antigua is your base for the first four days. A small UNESCO city you can walk across in an afternoon, with cobbled streets, serious coffee, and volcanoes visible from most rooftops. The mornings start slowly: shakeout runs in the foothills, local breakfasts, and a group that starts to feel less like a booking list and more like a team. Guatemala carries its history close to the surface. You feel it in the food, the textiles, the languages, the markets, and the conversations that happen when you’re not rushing through.

03 Commerce

Impact Weeks are built to put money into local hands for the full week, not just race day. Your booking supports SERES directly, but it also flows through local hotels, drivers, guides, cooks, coffee growers, translators, medics, and race staff. After the event, we publish an Impact Ledger showing where the money went and who delivered the work. The goal is simple: build a week where the local economy benefits because the event exists.

04 Challenge

The week closes on Pacaya, one of Guatemala’s active volcanoes. The course crosses old lava fields, climbs through coffee and pineapple farms, and brings you onto the ridge near the crater. Three distances: 10km, 21km, or 42km. The 42km Beast of Pacaya is exactly what it sounds like: long climbs, loose volcanic rock, heat, and one of the strangest landscapes most runners will ever move through. Generous cut offs. Proper aid stations. Local teams who know the trails (and what each volcanic rumbles to listen out for!). A race built to be completed, not merely survived.

Race Routes

10km · I 'Finca' That's Enough · 600m climb

The shortest distance is also the one most first-time trail runners book. You start inside Finca El Amate, drop through pineapple fields and family farms, and come out onto the southern lava field.

The ground changes under your feet from soil to rock to ancient lava in the space of a few hundred metres.

It’s an out-and-back, which means you’ll pass every other runner twice, and at least one of them will have slept in the tent next to yours.

21km · I 'Lava' This Race · 1,100m climb

The half marathon is the route most runners choose, and the one we’d recommend if you’ve done a few trail races and want to feel the scale of the volcano.

A fast opening drops you out of Los Pocitos onto the open lava field. Black sand. Sculpted rock. Heat coming up from the ground as well as down from the sun above it.

Then The Wall: a long, grinding climb that asks more of your head than your legs. Most people walk part of it. The cut-offs are generous on purpose, and the view at the top is the thing.

42km · The Beast of Pacaya · 1,600m climb

The full distance climbs and descends through every layer of the volcano. Cool farms in the early morning. The vast lava field by midday. The ridgeline around an ancient crater in the afternoon, with McKenney grumbling above you and the occasional pulse of ash drifting across the sky.

People walk parts of this race. People surprise themselves out there.

It is a serious marathon, but it’s run with you, not at you. We staff cut-off points, good local food, lots of water, and medical support across the whole route.

You’ll cross the line tired, and you’ll cross it.

Schedule

1 March 2027
¡Bienvenidos!

You land in Guatemala City, we move you out to Antigua. Antigua is small enough to walk across in an afternoon. Most blocks have a story. First dinner together as a group. By the end of the meal you'll know who's running which distance and who's done this before.

2 March 2027

To Ulew we go...

We travel out to the SERES learning site at Ulew Fuego, where the team is building a long-term home for the work. You’ll be on the ground with them, helping with whatever needs doing that season, and listening as they walk you through what they’re building and why. Most runners come back to this day in conversations afterwards.

3 March 2027

El Rodeo: A story of Community-Led Change

A walking tour through El Rodeo with young SERES facilitators, showing you the projects they run on their own ground: sustainable agriculture, recycling and waste, youth spaces, women’s leadership groups. You’ll ask questions. They’ll ask you some back. Nobody is performing, this is truly an inspirational, illuminating and powerful day for all.

4 March 2027

Guatemalan Coffee & Artistas de El Astillero

MMorning at a small Guatemalan coffee plantation, tracing the journey from steep volcanic slope through processing and roasting to the kitchen you make coffee in at home. Afternoon at Artistas de El Astillero, a hillside community where the artist Aura runs creative programmes for local children. Bring nothing more than yourself. Take photos only if you’ve asked.

5 March 2027

Camping under the stars

A slow morning in Antigua. After lunch, we drive out to Finca El Amate. Tents are pitched 50 metres from the start line. A short shakeout across the lava brings your legs back to life, if you like. You eat early. The volcano sits above the camp, you may well hear the rumbles, or see the lava through the night. You sleep with it in your head.

6 March 2027

Run the live volcano

Headlamps in the dark. Quiet jokes. The countdown, and you’re off. Hours later, depending on the distance you chose, you cross the line into a crowd of runners, locals, SERES staff, and youth from the community. We move back to Guatemala City that evening for the finishers’ dinner, and a night in a central hotel.

7 March 2027

Homecoming

Breakfast, photos, and the start of a group chat that will run for months. Some runners fly home. Others stay on for Acatenango, Lake Atitlán, or a few extra days in Antigua. Once you’ve booked, we’ll help you choose the right bolt-on for the days after the race.

What's Included

Six nights accommodation in Guatemala City, Antigua, and at race camp

All in-country transport for the week

Three meals a day, cooked locally

Race entry and bib for 10km, 21km, or 42km

National Park permits and Finca El Amate access

Full access to the Impact Week, including SERES and Artistas de El Astillero project days

Handmade finisher’s medal from Guatemala

Experienced local guides, medics, and race staff throughout the week

24/7 in-country support throughout the week

Structured training plan and GPX race files

Race-day staffing, hot food at the finish, and the finishers’ dinner in Guatemala City

Impact Ledger published after the event, showing where the money went and who delivered the work

Flights to and from Guatemala

Travel insurance

Visa costs, if required

Alcohol, snacks, and additional refreshments

Airport transfers outside the recommended arrival and departure windows

Mobile data and personal spending

Souvenirs

Tips for local guides and staff

Bespoke race coaching

Bolt-on trips, including Acatenango and Lake Atitlán

Blog

Tue 20 Feb 2024 · Liza Kershaw

2025 Guatemala Impact Marathon: A Thoughtful Stride into the Future

With our most popular local race returning in 2025, here's a look into what we are doing to make it the most powerful event yet...

Mon 18 Mar 2024 · Nick Kershaw

impact stories: guatemala beyond the headlines

When they go low - we go high. After receiving some online abuse aimed at our Guatemalan team members, we wrote and recorded this.

Fri 23 Jun 2023 · Nick Kershaw

Exploring the Enchanting History of Antigua: Our Home for the 7th Guatemala Impact Marathon

We have moved our Athletes' Village right into the centre of the UNESCO World Heritage town of Antigua - here's why!

Tue 29 Aug 2023 · Nick Kershaw

A Beginner's Guide to International Marathons: Why Start with Guatemala

Considering your first international marathon? How about broadening your horizons to a race that offers more than just miles and medals? Welcome to Guatemala, a destination that will redefine your running experience in the most fulfilling way.

Thu 20 Feb 2020

Guatemala Impact Marathon: From dream to reality

Orginally, we were looking at The Global Goals and pinpointing place the right communities to tell specific stories that we wanted to tell. That just shows how naive we were back then - and it was in the planning of our Guatemala race that we realised that the Impact platform only becomes powerful when communities tell their story, not the other way round.

Mon 8 Jun 2020 · Nick Kershaw

What's in a medal? The story behind an Impact medal

When we started out, we knew that in order to mark the completion of what is likely to be one of the hardest race of each runner’s life, we would need something pretty special. A momento to be treasured, displayed with pride, and that innately tells the story of the community.

Gallery

The people who’ll be running your week.

The team running this week is a mix of people who’ve been with Impact Marathon for years and Guatemalans who’ve shaped how the week works on the ground.

Pablo brought us Artistas de El Astillero. The SERES team has hosted runners every season since we started. The mountain race crew has been on Pacaya in every kind of weather it produces.

This is a country we love, and a week we build with people who care about it properly.

We’ll see you in Antigua.

The Impact

Three of your six days are spent inside the work of our community partners, alongside the people leading the projects in their own communities. It is not a charity visit. It is a structured, hosted part of the week, written into the schedule with the same weight as the race. By the time you reach the start line on Saturday, you will have spent more time with the project than most donors ever do. We publish the Guatemala Impact Ledger after race week: an online, verified record showing how runner fundraising is spent as the money moves into partner-led projects.

SERES

SERES has been our community partner in Guatemala since the first time we brought runners here. A female-founded, youth-led organisation, they train young Guatemalans and Salvadorans to lead on climate, food security, gender equality, and community resilience in their own villages and towns. They don't deliver programmes to people. They train the people who will. You are building on the work of seven cohorts of Impact Runners. And our 2028 cohort will be building on your contribution...

Artistas de El Astillero

El Astillero is a small hillside community where the artist Aura runs creative programmes for local children. Pablo introduced us to Aura's work for the 2023 race, and we've returned every year since. Two short meetings were enough. The project doesn't ask anything of you on the day. You arrive, you sit with people, you paint a bit, you leave somewhat reframed. It's one of those afternoons that quietly becomes a thing runners talk about months later.Cultural project focuses on children, youth and adults, from a community with limited resources. This is a community that lies just above Antigua, yet wasn't even on Google Maps prior to 2023. We will be walking to the project and spending time supporting the power of art in the lives of this amazing group of children. If ever you want to see the impact of every single $, this is it.

FAQs

An Impact Marathon is not just a race. It is a life-changing experience. For one week, you will be taken into the Impact Family, meet people from all over the world united in a movement to change the world for the better, through the power of running.

There are two options for accommodation:

Base Camp - This will be our standard package going forward in Guatemala. You'll get a beautiful twin/double room right in the heart of Antigua. If you've signed up with a friend, or partner, you'll be sharing here. If you've signed up solo, then you'll be sharing with another Impact Runner - lifelong friends will be made! When we head to the night of camping, you'll be sharing a two-man tent.

Summit Camp - This is our single supplement option. You'll have the same room as Summit Camp, but all to yourself. When we head to the night of camping, you'll also have your own tent ahead of race day.

We have a race goal that all Impact Runners work towards! This is not an arbitrary number, it is created in partnership with the charities we support in order to achieve a specific goal. This normally averages just over £1000 per Impact Runner, however you can select a target that challenges, excites, and motivates you. We do not set a minimum individual target.

International flights, airport transfers, travel insurance, rest day lunch, visa and alcohol/snacks.

If you are a citizen or resident in Guatemala, we open up race only registrations in July/August for this. We have grown to be the 2nd largest trail race in the nation, and we are incredibly proud to be the only international trail organisation in the nation.

It's tough.

Make no mistake about it. In every metric, our full marathon is one of the hardest races in the world. But that only tells half the story. We are incredibly proud of the inclusive energy generated at every Impact Marathon. Come as you are.

If this is your first race, or you are joining your partner on this crazy adventure - then you can pick the 10km or 21km and run as much as you can. We welcome those who need to walk a bit (literally everyone on this route, at some point). And we create generous cut-offs that not only keep you safe, but allow you the chance to complete the most challenge race of your life.

As a team, we look to get you to that finish, not pull you off the course. For that reason, and with our experience knowing every single element of the route, you are guaranteed the most memorable race of your life - no matter how experienced a trail runner you are.

Yes and yes.

There are water stations every 3-6km across the entire route. We have experiences medics around the route, lots of food, and even women's sanitary products at every station (Check out our SheRaces policy!)

The course is marked throughout, and we will give you all a GPX to add to your watch. For the main, there is one trail that you follow, and can't go wrong.

Guatemala Impact Marathon 2027

Guatemala • 1 - 7 March 2027 • 6 nights

From $1,866.47_/pp ~~$2,073.86_/pp~~

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