Participants in the 2019 Bend Marathon make their way along the course shortly after the start. The event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but returns in-person on Sunday.

Of all the sporting events that have been canceled over the past year in Central Oregon, perhaps none has endured worse luck than the Bend Marathon.

The event — which was scheduled for April 18 and includes a marathon, half marathon, 10-kilometer, and 5K race on roads and paved trails throughout Bend — has been canceled for the second consecutive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the first major events to be canceled in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, the sixth edition of the in-person Bend Marathon will now be pushed back to 2022.

At last week’s Bend City Council meeting, councilors were unable to come to an agreement on issuing the Bend Marathon a special event permit.

Marathon organizers Max King and Kari Strang had submitted a proposal that featured several safety protocols, including wave starts of no more than 75 runners, which would adhere to state and county guidelines for outdoor gatherings.

“They didn’t want to risk it,” a disappointed King said. “The spirit of the guidelines are that you don’t get that many people together, and we weren’t getting that many people together.”

King said he was expecting a total of about 900 runners across the four races. About 600 had registered before the event was canceled. In 2019 more than 2,400 runners and walkers participated in the Bend Marathon’s events.

The Bend Marathon course was to feature Bend parks, neighborhoods and the new paved trail through the Deschutes National Forest (paralleling the Cascade Lakes Highway).

King called it bad timing for the popular event.

“Around the race time we may be in low risk category by then and able to have more people getting together,” King explained. “We’re just not in a position where we can really wait anymore. We’ve got to get going on something. So that was why we asked the council to weigh in and give us a decision. We can’t just keep pushing it out.”

King said he had trouble understanding why his event was not granted a special event permit, while other similar events have been allowed to take place in-person over the last year, including the Haulin’ Aspen marathon and half-marathon in Bend last August and the Happy Girls half-marathon in Sisters last November. Also, the the Salmon Run half-marathon, 10K and 5K is being held at Pronghorn Resort northeast of Bend on April 10.

“We obviously don’t want to spread the disease, and that is what people are risk adverse to,” King said. “When we look at other things that are already happening in the community, such as Mt. Bachelor, restaurants and retail being open, and the lack of spread in outdoor events and the risk being really, really low, I don’t agree with where they’re coming from.”

King and Strang were also planning to decrease aid stations, require masks at the start and finish, and not allow spectators.

“Washington has guidelines for race-specific outdoor events like ours, that allow wave starts and a reasonable number of people,” King said. “That’s where we got our guidelines from. It’s hard when you’re looking at other things and you feel like there’s a double-standard. It makes it tough to say, ‘We won’t do this in the name of safety,’ when there are other things happening in the community.”

The 2021 Bend Marathon will still offer a virtual option, as it did last year. Participants can run their distance wherever and however they want from April 12 to May 25, and then upload their finishing time to bend-marathon.com.

“We want to hype it up and make it fun for people,” King said. “We don’t want it to be just an afterthought. We’ll do some fun events around the race time and some fun videos about training.”

And for now, the plan is certainly for an in-person Bend Marathon in 2022.

“Hopefully we’ll be out of using risk categories by next spring,” King said, “and we won’t have to worry about maximum event size.”