Théoden Janes: Charlotte has a 5K that sells out like a Taylor Swift concert. Why?
At 7:25 Saturday morning, Hannah Schwartz was 4½ miles into a six-mile run on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway when she and her sister stopped.
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They weren’t tired. They weren’t hurt.
Their alarms had gone off, reminding them it was time to interrupt one run so they could register for another: the Oct. 17 Runway 5K at Charlotte Douglas International Airport — a race that has been held for 19 years but only more recently has become one of Charlotte’s most novel hot tickets.
Both pulled out their phones and pulled up the website. They had five minutes to get ready.
At exactly 7:30, when registration opened, the pair started refreshing. The pages loaded agonizingly slowly. Their mother, trying from home, had the site freeze altogether. But the three women kept going, and after several more stressful minutes, they all got signed up.
With not much time to spare, either.
By 7:45 a.m., Race Roster was already telling would-be runners that the event was full.
“It’s absolutely insane,” says Schwartz, 44, of Lancaster, S.C. “I knew that it was going to sell out quickly. … I didn’t think it was going to be 15 minutes.”
That’s all it took for the 1,650 available spots to either have been claimed or to be spoken for by virtue of being in the midst of the registration process, according to Charlotte Douglas officials.
Which raises an obvious question:
How did a 5K at the Charlotte airport become this hard to get into?
Consider how quickly the Runway 5K — an annual fundraiser that has generated more than $300,000 for Central Piedmont Community College scholarships since 2019 — has gone from popular to frenzy-inducing.
In 2022, its 1,500 available spots didn’t even sell out. In 2023, it took at least a month.
Then things started shifting. In 2024, it sold out in just 10 days. Last year, after the airport increased capacity to 1,650, all of those spots were gone in less than three hours.
This time around? A mad scramble.
Patricia Howe was among those who was ultimately shut out.
The 60-year-old Charlottean was running with the Charlotte Run Walk group on Cherry Street when her alarm went off at 7:25. She logged in before registration opened and reached the payment screen by 7:38. Then she got a spinning wheel. At 7:43, it was still spinning. At 7:45, she was kicked out. When Howe tried again, the race was full.
And therein lies part of the reason the frenzy keeps growing: The increasingly quick sellouts have become their own form of advertising.
“It’s really the races that have a — gimmick’s not the right word, but a theme,” says Jen Forsyth of Start2Finish, which manages the Runway 5K for the airport. “There’s something cool and different about them. And then of course the selling out just creates more buzz, and then it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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Scarcity, however, only explains why people rush to register. It doesn’t explain why so many want to run this particular race in the first place.
For that, consider the course — 3.1 miles on a piece of Charlotte real estate where pedestrians ordinarily aren’t allowed, entirely on the airfield, largely on the runway, with airplanes as the scenery. “You just see the planes taking off like right where you’re running,” says Hannah Schwartz, whose father was a private pilot. “It’s always at sunrise. You see the sun coming up. You see the city in the background. It’s gorgeous.”
For the past several years, airport officials said in an email to The Charlotte Observer, American Airlines has even parked a Boeing 777 on the racecourse, adding that “runners literally run under its wing.”
And for runners chasing a personal best, there’s another attraction.
“The course is smooth, flat,” the airport says, “and features a whopping 1.2 inches of elevation.”
Of course, securing one of those coveted spots only earns runners the privilege of facing another challenge: actually getting to the runway.
As the race has evolved, so have the security measures required to put more than 1,600 runners onto the airfield of one of the nation’s busiest airports. In 2023, parking and security checks moved off airport property to Charlotte Premium Outlets. The following year, organizers began using charter buses to transport runners to the airport. And last year, Real ID requirements were added for the first time.
The security rules, airport officials say, are “basically the same as if you are boarding a plane at the terminal.”
Jeremy Stephenson, a 53-year-old Charlotte runner, knows the drill — and doesn’t exactly love it.
When he ran the Runway 5K with his family last year, his wife earned an age-group award, so they stuck around for the ceremony. By the time it ended, Stephenson says, the lines for buses back to the parking area were “well over an hour.” There are plenty of other local races, he points out, that “could use the support” without “the crazy logistics.”
So why did Stephenson stop in the middle of a 10-mile run Saturday morning to pull out his phone and try to sign up his family to do it all over again?
“It’s a very cool event,” he says.
It’ll go on without him this year, though.
On Saturday, he and his wife (who also was out running when registration opened) had agreed ahead of time that he’d stop running at 7:30 so he could log on and sign up the two of them plus his daughter. He forgot until 7:35. Once on the site, Stephenson managed to enter his own information, but when he tried to add his family, the registration stalled. He switched browsers and tried to start over.
At 7:43, he texted his wife: “Nope, it’s showing ‘race sold out.’ We’re done.”
Yet even after getting shut out — and despite thinking the race-day logistics make the whole thing almost more trouble than it’s worth — Stephenson doesn’t hesitate when asked whether he’ll make another run at getting in next year.
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“Yeah,” he says. “I’d try again.”
This story was originally published August 5, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
