Expo, schedule and race morning

Packet pickup

• Thursday, April 22, 2027 (per Health & Fitness Expo and Schedule pages): 12pm-7pm
• Friday, April 23, 2027 (per Health & Fitness Expo and Schedule pages): 10am-7pm
• Thursday, April 23, 2026 (per Race Week page - conflicting reading): 12pm-7pm
• Friday, April 24, 2026 (per Race Week page - conflicting reading): 10am-7pm

• Mandatory pickup: the Health & Fitness Expo page states all participants must visit the expo to pick up race packets (bib/race number, gear bag, t-shirt). No race-day packet pickup is listed anywhere on the pages fetched.
• Hard trap: the expo's last day ends Friday at 7pm and the marathon/half start Saturday morning. There is no Saturday expo day listed, so a Friday-evening arrival after 7pm leaves no listed way to get a bib.
• Gear check closes before you may expect (Race Week page): Saturday 5K/10K gear check opens 5:30am and closes 6:20am (10 minutes before the 6:30am start); Marathon/Half gear check opens 5:30am and closes 7:20am, i.e. exactly at the 7:20am start time.
• Bib lookup is not available until race week, per the Race Week page.
• Course time limits (Race Week page): Marathon 6 hours, Half 4 hours, 10K 2 hours, 5K 1 hour. Marathon cut-off checkpoints are enforced at miles 10.7, 15.7, 18.5 and 20.8; missing one means diversion off portions of the course and a DNF.
• The Schedule page carries the disclaimer that event schedule and locations are subject to change.

August 2026

The published weekend schedule

All facts above come from four pages on runrocknroll.com fetched 26 Aug 2026: /events/nashville, /events/nashville/health-fitness, /events/nashville/schedule, /events/nashville/race-week. Two other guessed URLs (/faq, /participant-info) returned 404. The site contradicts itself on the year and hall: the event, expo and schedule pages present the weekend as Thursday April 22 - Sunday April 25, 2027 with the expo in Halls C & D, while the Race Week page presents the expo as Thursday April 23 - Friday April 24, 2026 in Halls A & B. Both readings are recorded rather than reconciled. Expo hours (12pm-7pm Thursday, 10am-7pm Friday) and the two-day Thursday/Friday structure are consistent across both readings. Saturday gear-check and cut-off details come only from the Race Week page, which is on the 2026 reading, so they may not carry forward unchanged.

Getting there

Assume your car is useless on Saturday morning and build from there. The official Traffic Impact page says most closures and detours run 5:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with streets reopening progressively behind the field; a prior-year local traffic guide put the same window at 5:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., so the two published readings differ and you should plan for the longer one. On-street parking along the route is signed No Parking, and the race and police are unambiguous that vehicles there are ticketed and towed at the owner's expense -- a Metro Nashville PD post circulated stating towing begins at midnight the night before, which is early enough to catch anyone who parks after dinner and goes to bed. If you must drive in, the race names two garages off the course near the start, the Courthouse Parking Garage at 701 James Robertson Pkwy and the TA Lot at 151 N. 1st St, both at a $15 day rate with the TA Lot reservable online, and points at SpotHero for reserved spots near the expo, start and finish. Do not count on Nissan Stadium parking; a recent edition had none due to construction. WeGo local buses run on detour that morning, so a normal route lookup will lie to you.

• Riverfront Station and the WeGo Star. The commuter rail from Wilson County is the one piece of transit explicitly timed for this race. For the most recent editions it left the outer stations in the pre-dawn -- Mt. Juliet around 5:25 a.m., Hermitage 5:35, Donelson 5:45 -- and arrived at Riverfront Station at 6:00 a.m., early enough for a downtown corral with time to spare. Riverfront sits on 1st Avenue at the river, a flat few blocks from 8th & Broadway. The return train has left Riverfront around 1:30 p.m., roughly an hour after the event winds down. Tickets have run about $15 round trip with proceeds to St. Jude. Confirm the current year's times before relying on them.
• Music City Central (MTA bus terminal). The city's downtown bus hub on Charlotte Avenue is walking distance from both the start and the closure perimeter, which makes it a useful anchor for anyone staying on a bus line. Two cautions. WeGo has confirmed its routes run on detour on race day and directs riders to call (615) 862-5950 or check wegotransit.com for the day's pattern, and regular local service in Nashville does not generally start early enough on a Saturday to be a safe bet for a pre-7 a.m. corral. Treat the terminal as a way home in the afternoon, not a way to the start.
• Old Town Trolley race shuttle. This is the official race shuttle and the sanctioned answer if you are based outside the walkable core. Pickups are from the Opry Mills Mall north lot between Gaylord Opryland and the Regal cinema, Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, Airport Center, Sheraton Music City Airport and Loews Vanderbilt, and the same service returns runners to their original pickup point after the finish. Tickets must be bought ahead and swapped for a wristband at the Health & Fitness Expo before race day -- there is no buying your way on at 5:30 a.m.
• Rideshare on race morning. Uber and Lyft still work, but the closure perimeter means your driver cannot reach 8th & Broadway once the course goes live. Set your pickup well outside the loop, north of James Robertson Parkway or west past the interstate, and walk the last stretch. The same applies in reverse at the finish: expect to walk clear of the Nissan Stadium campus before a car can collect you.
• Getting back to your room after you finish. Because the finish is at Nissan Stadium and most hotels are downtown, the standard exit is on foot across the river. Walk out of the stadium finish area, cross back over the Cumberland toward Broadway, and you are at most twenty to twenty-five minutes from the SoBro and convention-centre hotels. This is slow and unglamorous on trashed quads, so pack a throwaway layer in gear check -- Nashville in late April can be humid and warm at noon or cold and wet at 7 a.m., and you will be standing in whichever one you get. If you took the official shuttle, the return coach goes back to your original pickup point; if you took the train, the Riverfront departure is early afternoon, so a slow marathon leaves less buffer than you think.
• Dinner the night before. Etch, at 303 Demonbreun Street, is a three-block flat walk from the 8th & Broadway start and about the same from the convention-centre hotels, which means you can eat well and be back in your room without crossing a closed street or hailing anything. It is chef Deb Paquette's place, globally inflected rather than red-sauce, with a proper pasta option and a kitchen that will not fight you on a plain plate; Saturday-evening service has run to 10:30 p.m. and weekday dinner from 4:30 p.m. It also carries a Michelin star now, so book well ahead -- if it is full, anything on the Demonbreun/5th blocks around the convention centre keeps the same short walk home, which on the night before a marathon matters more than the menu.

Published entry tiers

Checked 2026-08-26; fees and tiers can change.