Which Are the Largest Marathons in the United States?

A look at how the running landscape has changed from 2000 to 2022

A while back, I was curious about which marathons were the largest in the United States.

Everyone knows that New York City is the largest, and I’m sure you can guess a few of the other giants. But which other races round out the bottom of the list, and how much smaller are they than the giants at the top?

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

When I turned to Google for an answer, I was a bit disappointed. There were plenty of listicles with ten large marathons — but none provided clear, accurate data about which ones were the largest in a given year.

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As luck would have it, I just collected a lot of data about marathons for a series of articles I was writing. You can read more about it here.

But what’s important for our purposes today is that I have collected data on every marathon in the United States since 2000, and I can now offer a precise answer to the question.

So let’s dive in and take a look at what the data can tell us. Which marathons are the largest in the United States, and has the list changed in any…