What you need to know about Sunday’s Oakland Running Festival

The official course map of the 2015 Oakland Running Festival. The official course map of the 2015 Oakland Running Festival. Photo: Courtesy, Oakland Running Festival Photo: Courtesy, Oakland Running Festival Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close What you need to know about Sunday’s Oakland Running Festival 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

Thousands of runners of all ages and from all over the world will be jogging, sprinting and walking through the streets of Oakland on Sunday as the city’s annual running festival gets underway for its sixth year.

This year’s race will feature a 5-kilometer run, a half marathon and a full 26.2-mile marathon on a course that streaks through nearly every part of Oakland, from north to east to west.

Each of the races will start at Snow Park beside Lake Merritt, with the starting gun for the big race firing at 7:30 a.m., the 5k kicking off at 7:45 a.m. and the half marathon starting at 9:15 a.m. The Lucky Fun Run, for kids under 12, will get rolling at 9:20 a.m.

A race course of that size, with an expected 10,000 people participating, means that getting around town on Sunday will be no easy feat. Many streets will be closed in the morning including stretches of College, Telegraph, Piedmont, Lincoln and Coolidge avenues as well as International Boulevard and Broadway. The event’s website has a full list of street closures and detours.

Access to the Oakland Ice Center, the Lake Chalet, Children’s Fairyland, the Cathedral of Christ the Light, the Mormon Temple and the Fruitvale BART Station will be affected throughout the morning.

Streets around the start and finish lines in the area of 19th and Harrison streets will close Saturday evening and will remain closed until about 9 p.m. Sunday.

BART service doesn’t start until 8 a.m. on race day, so people will have to find other ways to get to the starting line. AC Transit runs a number of buses that stop near the festival, the Amtrak Capitol Corridor train drops off at Jack London Square and organizers have put together a handy list of parking garages in the area.

If this is the first you’ve heard of the festival and you want to participate, fear not. Online registration is closed, but runners can sign up in person at the Kaiser Permanente Health and Fitness Expo on Saturday at the Oakland Marriott City Center from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Marriott is downtown at 1001 Broadway.

Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale