Convenience Big Store: Why was the Houston Marathon run in Iraq in 2007?

Why was the Houston Marathon run in Iraq in 2007?

January 17, 2025

The Houston Marathon is the largest sporting event in the city. It's so big that one year they did another race on the other side of the world.

The Houston Marathon happened in Iraq one time. Seriously.

This Sunday, tens of thousands of road runners (and thousands more spectators) will brave the cold and take to the streets for the Houston Marathon.

The annual race, Houston's largest single-day sporting event, will take runners from downtown, through River Oaks, down to Rice Village and west to the Galleria area before looping its way back toward downtown, turning some of the city's iconic neighborhoods into a backdrop for athletic feats.

But did you know that, in 2007, a group of Marines also ran the Houston Marathon halfway across the world in Fallujah, Iraq?

I tracked down the then-21-year-old intelligence officer who won that race (and who has never even been to Houston!) to tell the story of how the Houston Marathon made it to a war zone.

Why was the Houston Marathon run in Iraq in 2007?

As Stephen Christensen, now 39 and living in Kansas City, recalled, the idea of running a marathon in Camp Fallujah came from a Marine captain who was an avid long-distance runner.

The captain reached out to the Houston Marathon asking if he could get credit for running the course if he ran 26.2 miles on the same day, and race officials embraced the idea by sending him T-shirts, medals and asking him to recruit any other Marines who wanted to participate.

With a couple of months to go before the race, the captain had recruited 28 Marines to run the Houston Marathon in Fallujah. Christensen, who at the time specialized in geographic intelligence products (he described it as "fancy words for maps"), had done some distance running, but he had never run a marathon.

He remembers the captain gathering all the runners in a gymnasium before the race and offering them a warning.

"One of the things he said was, 'You know, if it's your first marathon, just go out and do your best," Christensen said. "'You're not gonna win.'"

What were the challenges of organizing a marathon in a war zone?

As the runners were preparing to race, they and the American military were still waging war in Iraq. In January 2007, President George W. Bush was deploying tens of thousands more troops to the country as the eight-year-long unpopular war dragged on.

Instead of getting a journey through Houston like the participants who run the race here, these Marines got an extended tour of Camp Fallujah.

Because they couldn't leave the camp, the course mainly consisted of several laps along the inside perimeter of the base that added up to 26.2 miles. Fellow Marines helped set up water stations throughout the course for runners and also cheered them on as they made their laps.

The biggest challenge, Christensen said, was the toll the race took on his body.

Although he managed to win it, he had never run a marathon before. And his 12-hour work days gave him little time to train for a long-distance race.

So how'd he win?

On the morning of Jan. 14, 2007, Christensen remembers separating from the pack of nearly 30 runners early in the race and holding his lead until about the 20th mile. That's when he hit a wall and slowed to a jog and then a walk.

Two Marines passed him up as he lulled, and the race seemed lost. But with a few miles to go, Christensen realized the lead runners were also starting to slow down.

"One of the guys was hobbling. I think he had hurt his hip," he said, "and then the other guy, he was just out of gas, and I got my second wind. I could see the lead right there and I just took off."

Christensen, in his very first marathon, finished in first place with a time of 3:02:52.

His prize for the effort? An iPod nano that he said he hadn't seen in years and, of course, bragging rights.

Jhair Romero, Latino Communities Reporter

jhair.romero@houstonchronicle.com

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