Next year, 2026, will be a historic one for the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge. The world’s largest and most successful corporate sporting event will be celebrating its 50th continuous year of operation as a global Series.

Corporate Challenge owner and operator JPMorganChase is rightfully proud of that milestone and there are companies every year from the East Coast of the United States to Sydney, Australia that choose to make the 3.5-mile road race the focal point of happy news from their companies.

This year in New York City’s legendary Central Park, CBIZ, one of the largest accounting, insurance brokerage and advisory services providers in the world, had the confetti flying.

“This is CBIZ’s 40th year participating in the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge,” said Charlie Berk, who has been the CBIZ team captain for 25 of those 40 outings. 

“The Corporate Challenge continues to be a significant bonding event for CBIZ,” Berk said. “Gathering for the Corporate Challenge gives staff from our three New York City offices an out of the office opportunity to meet and socialize with each other.  The camaraderie that takes place at the picnic site, on the racecourse and at the pub afterwards, is heartwarming. It truly has been gratifying and a privilege to be a part of this event.”

When a Team Captain like Berk talks like that, it is hard to imagine the Corporate Challenge made its debut in Central Park on July 13, 1977 with a tidy 200 entrants from 50 companies. Oh, how it has grown.

This year, over two nights of New York racing, there were 30,000 participants from 855 companies. 

The 10 largest companies in terms of entrants for the 2025 Corporate Challenge New York were event owner and operator J.P. Morgan (2,022 participants), American Express (899), Morgan Stanley (700), Citadel and Citadel Securities (500), Hospital for Special Surgery (500), Goldman Sachs (489), SMBC Group (407), Bloomberg (392), Mizuho Americas (350), and UBS (345).

And while there is no limit to the number of entrants each of the 855 registered companies could have, there were hundreds of companies of all sizes that had teams ranging from the minimum four entrants to a few hundred. And one thing most had in common, like CBIZ, was their annual loyalty. Here’s another example; wealth management firm MIO Partners.

“For MIO Partners, the annual J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge is more than just a road race; it's a tradition that brings colleagues together beyond the walls of the office,” said MIO Partners team captain Sary Khim. “The event offers a chance to step away from day-to-day work and connect through shared effort, camaraderie, and a bit of light-hearted competition.”

The competition at the front of the pack was anything but light-hearted as the two best times in the 2025 J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge Series were submitted.

Reid Buchanan, representing Factua, was the fastest male over the two nights in Central Park, with a stunning time of 16:16 (4:39 mile pace) on a cool and rainy course Wednesday. New York proved in general to be an extremely fast track as the four best male times in 2025 to date were all posted in Central Park.

A New Yorker tops the female Leaderboard as well. Hannah McGovern, running for PDT Partners, clocked an outstanding 18:36 (5:19 mile pace), is the fastest worldwide thus far in 2025, with the Big Apple holding the top three female spots in the Series and four of the top five.

The beneficiary for the 2025 J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge once again was the Central Park Conservancy, the manager of Central Park. J.P. Morgan donated in celebration of the Corporate Challenge to support the Conservancy’s mission to restore, manage and enhance Central Park, the “home field” of the Corporate Challenge since its 1977 debut. The Corporate Challenge’s partnership with the Conservancy dates to the not-for-profit’s founding in 1980. It is the longest continuous beneficiary relationship in the Series.

The beauty of Central Park, and the camaraderie it generates via the vast number of picnic areas that are organized for the Corporate Challenge, is truly a draw to Erica Dingler, who has been participating regularly since 2006.

“I’ve continued to sign our team up again and again for the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge because of the camaraderie that comes out amongst the various departments,” Dingler, the New York Life team captain, said. “The connections that happen while meeting up in the picnic area, the groups that finish first to the ones that walk together until it is dark & everyone that finishes in between, those connections build and continue at the office.

“Being outside and being active is great for everyone, whether you do it on your own, but more importantly when you do it with people who may have been strangers and now go off to build a better work relationship, a better teamwork environment at the office,” Dingler continued. “Just like this year’s team shirt says, we’re more powerful together. That’s why we keep coming back.”

New York City was the sixth event in the 49th year of the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge Series, which is seeing an uptick in attendance from 2024. To date, the Series has drawn 89,700 participants (14,950 average per event), an increase of 2% over the 88,066 attracted through the same six events in 2024. Next up on June 4, with a whopping crowd of more than 60,000 total participants, is Frankfurt, Germany.