Are More Runners Qualifying for the Chicago Marathon Than In the Past?
An analysis of trends in finisher data from the past ten years
Last month, the Chicago Marathon announced it would implement a new set of qualifying times beginning with next year’s race.
The qualifying times are much stricter than they have been in recent years. I used data from 2023 to analyze the impact of the times, and the percentage of runners qualifying for Chicago would fall by about 40%.
I wanted to dig deeper into the data, though, and see how things have changed over time. Has the number of runners meeting the qualifying times increased in recent years — or was 2023 similar to the past?
A previous analysis I’ve done has shown that runners in American marathons have gotten faster in the last ten years — so it stands to reason that more of them would meet the qualifying times, too.
As part of a series on age grading marathon results, I put together a large dataset of individual results from American marathons from 2010 to 2019. This dataset includes approximately 2,000,000 individual finishes from 100 races across ten years.
