BestRacesEditor’s note, October 21, 2026: A reader on Instagram pointed out that the Battleship Half Marathon in Wilmington was missing. It was not in our index at all. We added it the next day with its 1,249-runner half-marathon field and a 1999 founding year, and it ranks No. 2 in North Carolina, level with Cape Fear Habitat at 55.4. That makes 27 ranked races, and three of the top four, not all four, run on Thanksgiving. It is also No. 8 on our national half-marathon list. The table below is as published on October 20.
The live North Carolina rankings are updated every day. This piece looks at the list as it stood on October 20, 2026.
North Carolina has 275 races in our index. Of the 148 still to be run, 26 clear the bar for our state rankings — 17.6%, ahead of Texas (9.3%), California (11.8%) and Florida (14.8%), behind Georgia (18.5%) and New Jersey (24.8%).
What sets the state apart is the top of the list. The four highest-scoring races in North Carolina all run on the same morning: Thanksgiving, November 26.
The North Carolina twelve
| # | Race | City | Date | Distance | Field | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Asheville Turkey Trot | Asheville | Nov 26 | 5K | 2,087 | 56.0 |
| 2 | Cape Fear Habitat Turkey Trot | Wilmington | Nov 26 | 5K | 3,034 | 55.4 |
| 3 | Beau’s Buddies Turkey Trot for Tots | Greenville | Nov 26 | 5K | 1,079 | 51.7 |
| 4 | 5 Before the Feast | High Point | Nov 26 | 5K | 684 | 50.4 |
| 5 | Bear Foot 5K | Bostic | Mar 13, 2027 | 5K | 349 | 49.1 |
| 6 | Butterball 5K | Salisbury | Nov 26 | 5K | 366 | 48.4 |
| 7 | Emerald Isle Marathon | Emerald Isle | Oct 24 | Marathon / Half / 5K | 286 | 48.0 |
| 8 | Colors 4 Cancer | New Bern | Oct 31 | 5K / 10K | 281 | 48.0 |
| 9 | Veterans Salute 5K and 10K | Concord | Nov 7 | 5K / 10K | 238 | 47.5 |
| 10 | Elm Street Athletic Festival | Greensboro | May 22, 2027 | 10 Mile / 5K | 171 | 46.6 |
| 11 | Beaufort Bridge Run | Beaufort | Nov 7 | 5K | 140 | 46.1 |
| 12 | Cures for the Colors Glow Run | Goldsboro | Nov 7 | 5K | 106 | 45.3 |
The other 14 are on the full North Carolina ranking.
Race pages carry more than the score. In Asheville the high on November 26 ran from 48°F to 66°F between 2021 and 2025, and the Asheville Turkey Trot page shows it year by year. The Elm Street Athletic Festival page will email you the day registration opens and before the entry fee goes up.
Four things the list tells you
Thanksgiving owns the top. Six of the 26 run on Thanksgiving Day, including Nos. 1 through 4. Cape Fear Habitat has the biggest field in the state’s rankings — 3,034, or 28% of the 10,717 runners across all 26 — but finishes second to Asheville by 0.6 points. The difference is age: Asheville’s founding year on record is 2001, Cape Fear’s 2005, and our history component rewards the four extra years by more than Cape Fear’s extra 947 runners earn on field size.
No North Carolina race is fully measured. Twenty-four of the 26 are scored on exactly two of our four components; two, the Holly Springs Half Marathon (No. 19) and the Lean30 Lake Norman Half (No. 23), on three. None has a character score, and not one of the 275 North Carolina races in our index is flagged as a Boston qualifier. A race measured on half the formula is pulled toward a neutral 50, which is why the No. 1 tops out at 56.0. Of the 15 state lists with at least a dozen races, only Alabama’s No. 1 scores lower.
Certification gets races in, not up. Twelve of the 26 are USATF certified, 46%, against 51% across every state list. Each certificate scores 40 of 100 on our credentials measure — below the neutral 50 — so it counts as a second signal without lifting a race up the table. That is the story of Nos. 7 through 12: six certified races between 45 and 48.
It is a fall calendar, and a 5K one. Eighteen of the 26 run between October and December, eleven of them in November, three on November 7 alone. Twenty lead with a 5K. There are two marathons: Emerald Isle at No. 7, this Saturday, and the Mangum Marathon in Ellerbe at No. 24, on January 16, 2027.
Age, mostly by edition number
Sixteen of the 26 earn a history score, but only Asheville and Cape Fear have a founding year on record. The rest carry their age in their names: the Bear Foot 5K in Bostic is in its 22nd edition, the Lake Norman Half Marathon Turkey Trot its 20th, the Butterball 5K its 19th. That is how a 349-runner 5K in Bostic reaches No. 5 — the only race in the top 12 not run in the fall.
Where the cities are
Not at the top. The Charlotte and Raleigh–Durham metros each place two races on the state list, none higher than No. 9: Concord and Cornelius on Best Races Near Charlotte, Holly Springs and Wake Forest on Best Races Near Raleigh–Durham. The top four come from Asheville, Wilmington, Greenville and High Point.
What is missing
Of the 122 upcoming North Carolina races that miss the list, 49 have no measured signal and 70 have exactly one — for 53 of them, a field size with nothing to pair it with. The clearest case is the Davidson Turkey Trot: 1,784 runners, the third-largest field among the state’s upcoming races, also on Thanksgiving, and unranked because a field size is all we know. The other three are multisport events, scored on the triathlon list. Ten more races we can date but not score sit in their own tier on the state page, ordered by age.
A race that has posted results for years but never said when it started looks, to our formula, exactly like one that started last year. Claiming a listing is free. It lets an organizer add a founding year or a certification, and it cannot buy a better rank — only a more complete one.