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5 things to know about Zouhair Talbi, the top American men’s finisher at the 2026 Boston Marathon
Talbi originally hails from Morocco and joined the U.S. Army Reserve to gain U.S. citizenship.
On a morning where John Korir set a new record at the Boston Marathon with a time of 2:01:52, several American runners also impressed on the 26.2-mile trek from Hopkinton to Boylston Street.
Zouhair Talbi, 31, led the way for U.S. runners on Monday, finishing fifth overall in the 130th Boston Marathon with a time of 2:03:15.
Talbi’s finishing time on Monday stands as the fastest ever by an American during the Boston Marathon — a full 1:13 faster than Ryan Hall’s previous record of 2:04:58 from the 2011 running of the storied event.
Here are five things to know about Talbi:
He grew up in Morocco
Talbi is now a U.S. citizen, but he didn’t move to the United States until he ran collegiately in 2019.
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Talbi grew up in the town of Tighassaline, which is about 180 miles southeast of the Moroccan capital of Rabat.
Speaking to Lets Run’s Alex Geula, Talbi acknowledged that he didn’t start to take up distance running until his teenage years, primarily playing soccer from the ages of 6 to 14.
He made the switch to competitive running in high school, telling Geula that those years spent running on the pitch served as the “perfect base training” to become a good distance athlete.
He eventually spent five seasons competing for the Moroccan national team from ages 18-22 before deciding to make the move to the U.S. to earn his bachelor’s degree and take the next step in his running career.
He became a dominant runner against NAIA competition
Prior to making the move over to the U.S., Talbi — who grew up speaking Arabic, French, and a Berber language only spoken in his village in Morocco — spent over a year learning English in order to better communicate with his coaches and teammates.
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Talbi, then 23 years old, eventually settled in at Northwest Kansas Technical College in 2019, competing for 1.5 seasons for the Mavericks.
Despite finding his footing in Kansas, Talbi admitted to Let’s Run that there was some culture shock moving from Rabat (a population of over 500,000) to the town of Goodland, Kansas, which has a population of just 4,465.
Still needing two more years of school to complete his bachelor’s degree, Talbi landed at Oklahoma City University, an NAIA school. While Talbi wanted to transfer to an NCAA Division I program, he was ineligible to compete at the D1 level because he was over five years removed from graduating high school.
Talbi, who eventually earned his bachelor’s degree in 2022, quickly began to put himself on the map as an elite runner.
Over his two years at OCU, Talbi was a two-time NAIA men’s cross country athlete of the year, an NAIA indoor men’s track & field athlete of the year, and a two-time individual cross country national champion.
He impressed in his Boston Marathon debut
Talbi made the most of his first running of the Boston Marathon in 2023. He finished fifth overall in the race (2:08.35), finishing one spot ahead of Eliud Kipchoge, who was the world record holder in the marathon from 2018 to 2023.
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That result in Boston propelled Talbi even further as he continued to shine on the international stage. In August 2024, he finished 35th overall (2:11:51) in the marathon while representing Morocco in the Summer Olympics in Paris.
Earlier this year, he set a new course record with a first-place time of 2:05:45 at the 2026 Houston Marathon.
He’s enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve
Talbi finally secured his U.S. citizenship in 2025, doing so by enlisting in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Talbi, who is now married after meeting his wife, Elizabeth, while competing at OCU, feels as though he’s settled into his new home in the U.S.
Even though Talbi had a path to citizenship through his wife, he decided to enlist in the Army Reserve to not only expedite his citizenship but also receive benefits to help him and his growing family. His wife gave birth to a son, Amir, in March 2025.
“When I came here as an immigrant, after a few years you feel like all your life or your identity starts being here, like you belong more here,” Talbi said in an interview with Lets Run’s Jonathan Gault. “You’re just thinking about, I have a son and he’s going to be growing up here. I just want my all life to be pretty much here … It felt natural for me.”
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“For me as a foreigner here in America, I was lacking a lot of help when it comes to health insurance, other benefits,” Talbi added. “The Army provides you with a lot of things.”
Even though Talbi is now a U.S. citizen, he’ll need to wait a bit longer before representing the United States on the international stage.
World Athletics usually requires a three-year wait for an athlete transferring allegiances. Because Talbi represented Morocco in the 2024 Summer Olympics, he’ll need to wait until 2027 to represent the U.S. in international competition, meaning he could be eligible to compete for the U.S. at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Talbi’s 2026 Boston Marathon time is not an official U.S. record
Talbi’s final time of 2:03:15 isn’t just the fastest time ever posted by an American at the Boston Marathon. It was also faster than the official U.S. record in a marathon, which was set by Conner Mantz during the 2025 Chicago Marathon with a time of 2:04:43.
However, Talbi’s time won’t stand as a new official record for U.S. distance runners.
Due to a ruling from World Athletics, times set during the Boston Marathon are not eligible for official records for several factors.
Boston’s course is a “point-to-point” marathon, meaning that it travels from one location to another over the course of the race.
That is a departure from several other marathon courses and violates a section in World Athletics’ rulebook on record-reliable races where the starting and finishing points of a course — when measured across a straight line between them — can’t be farther apart than 50 percent of the race distance.
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The elevation changes over Boston’s hilly course also violate a ruling from World Athletics, which states that the “overall decrease in elevation between start and finish shall not exceed an average of one meter per kilometer” on a marathon course.
Boston’s course changes at an average of approximately 3.33 meters per kilometer.
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