HOLLYWOOD — For a few weeks this spring it looked as though the Runyon Canyon 10K might finally return, and then, as it has each year since the last one was run, it didn’t.
The race, a punishing 10-kilometer climb up the fire road above Hollywood, has not been held since 2019. What began as a one-year pause stretched, through a tangle of scheduling and a run of unrelated disruptions, into a hiatus now approaching six years. This spring an organizing effort tried to end it, aiming to put runners back on the hill by late April. As of this week, that plan is off, pushed toward next year.
The obstacle, organizers said, was not enthusiasm but paperwork. Staging a race on the fire road at Runyon Canyon means satisfying a park that thousands of people already use every day, and the permitting — traffic control at the Fuller Avenue gate, a cap on the field, a plan to keep the trails open to ordinary hikers during the event — did not come together in time to hold the race safely this spring.
“We could have forced it and done it badly. I wasn’t going to do that,” said Janine Ruel, who has worked to revive the event and expects to direct it whenever it does come back. “Runyon isn’t a stadium. It’s a working park, and everybody who hikes it has a claim on it that morning we’d be asking them to share. You don’t rush that.”
The canyon’s popularity is exactly what makes the race hard to stage and worth staging. On any given morning the fire road carries a steady parade of hikers, dogs and people filming themselves, a crowd that does not pause for a footrace. Threading a few hundred runners through that traffic without closing the park to everyone else takes a plan the organizers were unwilling to improvise.
Longtime runners took the delay with the resignation of people who have heard it before. The race, in its day, drew a devoted local field — club runners chasing a time on a course that punishes them for it, and neighborhood people who signed up on a dare and walked the switchbacks laughing. Several said they had kept the last week of April loosely open for years, out of a habit they were not ready to break.
Ruel said the goal now is a return in 2026, with the permitting started early enough that the date holds. She has a course in mind, more or less the old one, and a sense that the appetite is still there, banked but not gone. The hill, she noted, is not going anywhere, which is both the appeal and the problem.
For this spring, the fire road stayed as it always is on a weekend morning: crowded with hikers making their own slow way up, none of them racing, all of them climbing the same hard mile the runners will have to wait another year to time.