The 2019 Shanghai International Marathon (SIM) is approaching. This year, the competition will award fast runners with a souvenir T-shirt, according to a news conference held on July 29.

With a slogan of “The best for the best”, the event is trying to incentivize the runners to achieve breakthroughs and also make the SIM one of the first marathons to be labeled platinum-level.

(The press conference for the 2019 Shanghai International Marathon. Photo/Chinanews.com)

In 2018, 720 SIM runners in total finished the competition within 3 hours, breaking the previous record in China. To encourage more runners to push past their limits, SIM is the first domestic mainstream marathon to launch an exclusive souvenir T-shirt for runners finishing the marathon within 3 hours, which is also a reward for their support for the SIM and passion for road running.

(The exclusive souvenir T-shirt for runners finishing the marathon within 3 hours)

This year, the SIM will start on November 17. The starting line is still set at the iconic Golden Bull Plaza on the Bund, and the route for the full marathon will end at Shanghai Stadium by way of the Bund, the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street, Jing’an Temple and many other city landmarks. The event is divided into three types: Full Marathon, 10-kilometer Run and Mini Marathon, with a total of 38,000 places for the participants. The total scale and the allocation of runners remains the same as that of last year. The number of participants allowed in the three performance classes is 25,000, 6,000 and 7,000 respectively.

(Routes of 2019 SIM)

The registration information was also announced at the July 29 news conference. The first of the three categories is priority/elite runners. Priority runners refer to the top 200 participants in the 2019 Shanghai International Women’s Half Marathon, as well as the top 600 male and top 300 female participants in the 2019 Shanghai International Half Marathon. In addition, those runners whose results in the 2018 SIM full marathon meet the required standards in their corresponding age group (according to the Implementation Measures of Rating Common Runners’ in CAA Marathons and Related Sports) will be qualified as elite runners.

In order to tap the potential of more excellent Chinese runners and encourage more runners to take the event seriously, the SIM specially sets prizes for Chinese runners, with a first prize of 45,000 yuan, the second of 20,000 yuan, and the third of 12,000 yuan.

The Shanghai International Marathon began in 1996. In 2018 it was ranked first in China as an international race, and 15th in the world by the International Association of Athletics Federations.