Mumbai: Come January, thousands of people across India will be getting into their running shoes, perfecting their pace, getting together for practice runs in the morning, perhaps exchanging notes on their performance, sharing Strava screenshots of their completed runs, all to line up in the wee hours for one of the tens of major marathons India’s major cities will host this month and the next.
Distance running—from the humble 3K and 5K for beginners to the humbling half- and full-marathons—has slowly become a national obsession as getting fit becomes aspirational. Nearly all of India’s major cities are host to at least one major marathon with an impressive title sponsor, while smaller cities and towns too begin hosting local races.
More than 20 years after the Mumbai Marathon was started and became India’s biggest running event, distance running has become a serious business enterprise, generating hundreds of crores in direct revenue from participation fees and sponsorships along with additional money made from participants buying goods and travelling to these races.
Marathons and other distance running events are driving annual revenue of ₹250-300 crore in the sale of clothes and shoes, travel, hotels and other components of the ‘running economy’, according to a September 2025 report by consulting firm KPMG. India hosts more than 1,500 marathons with participants per race ranging from a few thousands to more than 65,000 in marquee events such as the Tata Mumbai Marathon.
“We never really had a culture of participative sport,” Vivek Singh, joint managing director at sports firm Procam International, told Mint in an interview. He founded Procam in 1988 with his brother Anil. “In the last 38 years, we have had a ringside view of sport in India, we can say that the Mumbai Marathon has been a watershed moment that changed the paradigm of participative sport in India.”
This year will be the 21st edition of the Tata Mumbai Marathon, and 65,000 participants registered over the past few months, prompting organizer Procam International to close registrations early. The run is slated for 18 January 2026, and the registrations had opened in August 2025.
Running fever
From 7,000-8,000 registered runners in the early 2000s, Procam contends India has over 2.8 million people registering for big and small running events all year round, creating an ‘ecosystem’ worth $450 million every year, including sponsorships, barter deals, sales of nutrition goods and training equipment and registration fees.
“Outside of cricket, there is no football, there is no hockey, no participative sport that touches the amount of money that comes into running in India,” Procam’s Singh said, adding that 1,100 registered races around the country in a year generate roughly ₹800 crore in direct annual revenue.
Marathon sponsorships have long attracted the biggest corporate names, largely conglomerates and companies that otherwise have little consumer-facing advertising. The Tata Group, sponsor of the Mumbai Marathon since its inception, has been a prominent name in marathons for years, including group companies such as Tata Steel, the chief sponsor of Kolkata’s World 25K, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that sponsors 14 major marathons around the world, including the New York City Marathon, the London Marathon, and more recently, the Sydney Marathon. TCS reportedly spends roughly $30-40 million every year on sponsoring these races.
In fact, N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons and former chief executive of TCS, has spent many years completing major marathons world over, including the ones in London, Berlin and New York. In 2018, he finished the half-marathon in Mumbai in just over 2 hours.
“For brands, these events are ‘living billboards’, where marketing meets purpose,” the KPMG report said. “The business of community fitness is where commerce and culture converge creating healthier societies while opening multi-billion-dollar opportunities for brands, investors, and policymakers.”
UK-based brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance estimated that marathons helped increase TCS’ brand value from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $21.3 billion in 2025.
It shows in the numbers in India too. According to WPP Media (formerly GroupM), nearly a fourth of all sponsorship money in emerging sports now comes from marathons alone, the media firm said in its annual sports business report in May 2025.
In 2024, sponsorships in emerging sports—which includes marathons, kabaddi, football, and the Olympics—grew more than 19% to ₹2,461 crore. Per WPP Media’s estimates, marathons would have brought in roughly ₹600 crore in 2024.
But, marathons are still a niche presence in India; it comprised 15% of the country’s total sports business worth ₹16,663 crore as of 2024, while cricket, predictably, dominates.
New avenues
Running isn’t the only participative sport attracting elite urban Indians. In the last couple of years, similar races across sports have been growing in India.
Later this month, Pune will host the Bajaj Pune Grand Tour, a 437km long race organized by civic authorities of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad with Bajaj as the title sponsor. This will be India’s first ever UCI 2.2 event, a professional classification for races by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global governing body for cycling.
Besides, last year, India hosted the first ever set of Hyrox events, a race that involves a series of strength and endurance exercises punctuated by short-distance running around a course. Hyrox was founded in 2017 and brought to India by Rainmatter, the venture capital arm of Zerodha, and Yoska, a sports firm and Rainmatter portfolio company. Yoska also organizes other events such as the Ironman 70.3 Goa, an elite race that involves 1.9km of swimming, 90km of cycling, and a half-marathon run.
-Major brands are warming up to these new categories of races too, even as they continue to associate with the traditional distance running event. One example is the shoes and sportswear company Puma. In May 2025, Puma signed a multi-year contract with sports firm NEB Sports to sponsor its Mumbai Half-Marathon and Wipro Bengaluru Marathon races. It is also an official partner of Hyrox globally, including in India.
“We are a sports and performance brand, so for us it has always been a no-brainer to invest in anything that is performance first,” Shreya Sachdev, director of marketing at Puma India told Mint in an interview. “We see steady growth in half and full-marathon categories, but the bigger growth in the 5k and 10k categories. There has been an explosion in running from 2020 onwards.”
For Puma, and any race sponsor, marathons are a game of scale while newer, niche events like Hyrox help it reach a more athletic, elite crowd. “Marathons have so many categories that you are able to reach out to every runner within one marathon,” Sachdev said. “You can talk to amateurs with the 5k and 10k and then to the professional runners with the half- and full-marathons, reaching 40-60,000 people in a matter of 3-4 days.”
In contrast, Hyrox and similar events bring a few thousand participants and spectators. But, Sachdev says, events like these bring people willing to spend big money to train, travel and participate in events more complex than just running.
Even though running is merely a shadow of cricket’s size and scale in India, the appeal for sponsors is the emotional investment that participants put into it, compared even to viewers of a cricket match. “Compare a person buying tickets to a match in Wankhede [Stadium] with someone who is waking up early, six months in advance…,” Procam’s Singh said. “...and has set a goal to run a marathon in under six hours or a half-marathon in under three hours, or a 10k in less than 60 minutes, or just to finish a family walk and raise money for a good cause.”
This story was updated for the $30-40 million spending by TCS as a sponsor of races. It earlier was mentioned as $30-40 billion.