Analyzing the Changing Demographics of Marathon Finishers from 2010 to 2019
Participants are getting older, and we’re getting closer to gender parity
Earlier this month, I published an analysis of the results of 50 years of demographic data from the New York City Marathon.
Specifically, I was interested to see how the field has changed over time in terms of gender and age.
If you rewind to 1970, marathoning was almost entirely a male sport. Today, it’s much more even, although there are still slightly more men than women. But beneath the surface, I was curious to see how the balance was shifting in terms of age — and whether the patterns for men and women were different.
The advantage of using the New York City Marathon as a dataset is that it has 52 years of consistent data. But it is possible that its field is not truly representative of marathoning as a whole.
So today, I’m going to take a few of the conclusions from that previous analysis and see how they stack up against a different dataset that includes a representative sample of marathons in the United States from 2010 to 2019.
