What is Pat’s Run?
Thirty thousand people in matching shirts fill the streets of Tempe at seven on a Saturday morning in April, run 4.2 miles, and finish by sprinting out of a tunnel onto a college football field to the 42-yard line. The numbers are not arbitrary. Pat Tillman wore 42 at Arizona State, where he played linebacker from 1994 to 1997 before four seasons with the Arizona Cardinals. In 2002 he turned down a new NFL contract and enlisted in the Army with his brother. He was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. His family and friends founded the Pat Tillman Foundation that year, and Pat’s Run has been its signature fundraiser since the first one in 2005.
The race starts beside Mountain America Stadium, the renamed Sun Devil Stadium, loops through the streets around the ASU campus and comes back to finish inside the bowl where Tillman played. Wheelchair athletes go at 7 a.m., the field at 7:05, and a 0.42-mile kids’ run takes the field at 10. The 22nd annual, on April 11, 2026, drew about 30,000 participants, which puts it among the largest races in the country and makes it the single biggest running morning in the Valley; the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona weekend in January is bigger only if you count all its distances together. Dozens of Tillman Honor Runs happen in other cities the same month for people who cannot get to Tempe.
Registration in 2026 opened January 7 at $42.40 for a single day and climbed in steps to $75.40 in April. The money funds the Tillman Scholars, graduate students who are veterans or military spouses. The 2027 date had not been announced as of October 2026; it will be a Saturday in the first half of April, twenty minutes south of Old Town, and if you run one race a year in Arizona this is a good one to pick.
How to run it
Register in January. The race opens registration in the first week of January, and the opening-day price lasts twenty-four hours. Prices then rise monthly, corrals are assigned in the order people sign up, and anyone who wants to run with a friend must register in the same transaction to share a corral. Packet pickup runs on the three days before the race, with a mail option for about $10 if you buy it by early March.
Get there without a car. The streets around the stadium close from before dawn, and the stadium lots are full by 6. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Veterans Way/College Avenue, a few hundred yards from the start; from Scottsdale, drive the Loop 101 south to the 202 west and park at a rail station, or have someone drop you on Mill Avenue and walk.
The course. It starts beside the stadium, winds through the streets of Tempe and the campus, and comes back to the buttes. Run the first two miles easy; the heat is not an issue at 7 in April, but the crowd is dense in the early corrals and weaving costs more than it gains. The tunnel comes fast. You run out of the dark onto the field, the stands are full of people who finished ahead of you, and you cross at the 42.
After. Walk the field, find the Tillman statue at the north end by the tunnel the team uses, and climb Hayden Butte from the stadium’s west side if you have anything left; the view down into the bowl is the one Tillman’s teammates saw. Mill Avenue is a ten-minute walk for breakfast, and the Tempe campus is pleasant in April before the heat.
What to bring. Your bib, a throwaway layer for the 55-degree start and sunscreen for the finish, which can be 80 by nine. Travel light; bag-check lines are long.
First-timer mistakes. Driving to the stadium. Starting in a corral ahead of your pace. Skipping the kids’ run, which at 10 a.m. on the field is the most cheerful hour of the day.
A race built on a number
Pat Tillman was an undersized, overachieving linebacker who walked onto the ASU team in 1994, won Pac-10 defensive player of the year as a senior in 1997 and graduated summa cum laude in three and a half years. The Cardinals took him in the seventh round in 1998, and he started at safety for four seasons at what was then Sun Devil Stadium, which the Cardinals shared with ASU until Glendale opened. In May 2002, eight months after September 11, he and his brother Kevin enlisted. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 75th Ranger Regiment and was killed near the Pakistan border on April 22, 2004. The Army first described an ambush; it was later established that he was shot by his own unit, and the handling of that fact became a national controversy.
The foundation his family and friends started that year chose a run rather than a gala, and chose the number. The distance is 4.2 miles, the finish is the 42-yard line, the kids’ course is 0.42 miles. The first edition in 2005 was a Tempe fun run; within a decade it was drawing tens of thousands and spawning Honor Runs in Flagstaff and cities across the country. The 2026 race, with roughly 30,000, was started by the actor and former Marine Rob Riggle, who then ran it.
The foundation itself changed shape. Its Tillman Scholars program has put hundreds of veterans and military spouses through graduate school, and Pat’s Run is the foundation’s signature fundraiser for it. That is the thing to know about the crowd: a large share of it is scholars, veterans and families, and the shirts with names on the back are not sponsors.
The Scottsdale angle
Scottsdale has no race this size. The city’s running calendar is a handful of 5Ks and the January marathon weekend that passes through on its way to Tempe. Pat’s Run is twenty minutes south, on a Saturday in the best month of the year, and it finishes in the one stadium in the Valley with a view, wedged between two buttes with the Tempe Town Lake towers in the open end. The Cardinals left this building for Glendale in 2006; the rebuilt bowl is a better place to watch college football than it was, and a better place to finish a run than any road in Scottsdale. Register in January, take the train, run the first two miles easy and save your legs for the tunnel.