A rare family finish
Carlos and Mia Sanchez are set to become a grandfather–granddaughter duo to both qualify for and race the 130th Boston Marathon on April 20, a pairing the Boston Herald says has no documented history at the event. (bostonherald.com)
Carlos Sanchez, 67, and his granddaughter Mia Sanchez, 23, are set to start the Boston Marathon together on April 20. (baa.org) The pair qualified at the Mountains 2 Beach Marathon in Ventura, California, in April 2025, with Mia running 3:14:26 in her first marathon and Carlos running 3:50:49 on his 37th try at a Boston qualifier. (dailyfreepress.com) Carlos beat the men’s 65-69 qualifying standard by nearly 15 minutes, and Mia beat the women’s 18-34 standard by more than 10 minutes. Both were later accepted into the 130th Boston Marathon field. (runningmagazine.ca) The Boston Athletic Association says the 130th race will be held on Patriots’ Day, Monday, April 20, 2026, with 32,494 entrants and about 30,000 expected starters. (baa.org) Boston is the world’s oldest annual marathon, first organized in 1897, and the Boston Athletic Association does not track family relationships among finishers. That has left outside reporting to establish whether a pairing like this has happened before. (baa.org, dailyfreepress.com) The Daily Free Press reported that the Boston Athletic Association could not point to another documented grandfather-granddaughter duo in the same Boston Marathon. Running Magazine separately described Carlos and Mia as the first such pair in the race’s 130-year history. (dailyfreepress.com, runningmagazine.ca) Carlos did not begin running until age 50, when he ran the 2008 Chicago Marathon with his daughter Alexis. Since then he has run marathons in 12 states, plus Greece and Cuba, and trains six days a week. (kvue.com, runningmagazine.ca) Mia is a Harvard graduate student and a former National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II runner at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. She told KVUE that she got into running by watching her grandfather race. (dailyfreepress.com, kvue.com) Their Boston start came out of a text Carlos sent in spring 2025 asking whether Mia was “maybe marathon-ready.” On April 20, they are expected to share a starting line that Boston’s record keepers do not appear to have seen before. (kvue.com, dailyfreepress.com)
