Last weekend was the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Marathon. To celebrate the occasion, over 54,000 runners ran the race.
As I do after each World Marathon Major, I’ve collected the results and analyzed them to see if there are any interesting tidbits. I’ve published a detailed analysis in Runner’s Life, which you can find here.
If you’re not a Medium subscriber, you can request a special link to that article here.
In the meantime, keep reading below for a brief version of that analysis, along with three visuals and a couple of insights.
Specifically, we’ll look at:
- The field size of the world’s largest marathons
- The gender distribution at Berlin, by runner’s nation of origin
- The distribution of finish times among runners under 40
Just How Big Is the Berlin Marathon?
This year, all of the headlines declared the Berlin Marathon to be the biggest marathon ever.
But how does it compare to previous editions of the Berlin Marathon – and how does it compare to the other contenders for the title of the world’s largest marathon?
The visual below includes the number of finishers at five of the largest marathons worldwide: Berlin, London, Paris, New York City, and Chicago. The stats cover the last three years, although New York and Chicago don’t have any data for 2024.
Note that 2022 was, in some cases, still an outlier year. It was in the middle of the post-COVID period. Many races returned in 2021 with severely reduced field sizes, and most had fully recovered by 2023. But 2022 was a wildcard, with some races not quite back in their full glory.
The three bars in 2024 are almost identical.
London had 53,877 finishers in late April 2024. If it hadn’t been for the Paris Marathon two weeks earlier, London would have officially become the largest marathon ever.
But Paris had 53,899 finishers. Just enough to beat back London’s challenge. It was also enough to push Paris past the pre-COVID record holder: the 2019 New York City Marathon (53,520).
So although Berlin’s 54,062 finishers was a record – it was only by a small margin. Truthfully, Berlin, London and Paris were all roughly the same size this year. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see that New York City is also in the 53,000 to 54,000 range this year.
They’re all bigger than the biggest races last year. In 2022, NYC took the lead (51,348), followed by Paris (50,780). None of the others broke the 50,000 mark.
So up until this year, it had been rare for a marathon to have more than 50,000 finishers – but it’s quite likely that all five of these races will have 50,000+ finishers in 2024.
And what about the history of Berlin?
In the visual, you can see that this year’s race is a huge jump over last year. And an even bigger jump over 2022.
Pre-COVID, Berlin had three years in which it had around 40,000 or more finishers – 2017, 2018, and 2019. 2019 was the previous peak, with 43,976.
For Berlin, I think the bigger question is whether this field size is here to stay. With the fanfare of the 50th anniversary in the past, it’s possible (and possibly wise) for this race to shrink back to the 40,000 to 45,000 range.
How Does the Gender Distribution Vary Between American and International Runners?
When I analyzed the history of the Berlin Marathon, I was surprised to see that the gender breakdown of the race was roughly 2-1 men.
Although there’s a long history of discrimination and gender imbalance in marathons, that has been changing in recent years. My analysis of American marathons has shown that the overall field is much more balanced today – and among younger runners women make up a slight majority.
So I was curious to see what the breakdown was in Berlin this year – and whether it varied by where the runners came from.
It turns out that there are very different gender dynamics at play in the United States and abroad.
The visual above segments the field into three groups – Germans, Americans, and everyone else.
The German runners and the other international runners both breakdown about 2-1 men. They also make up the vast majority of the field (~85%).
American runners, on the other hand, are just about 50-50.
While I was analyzing data for an article on the gender dynamics at the Boston Marathon, I checked the same thing. At Boston, too, the breakdown of American runners is closer to 50-50 while the breakdown of international runners is closer to 2-1.
Combine that with the fact that the ratio is the same for German runners as it is for other international runners, and you can eliminate the possibility that international travel might be driving some of the difference.
So the most likely explanation is that marathon running outside of the United States is still a male dominated sport – or at least much less balanced along gender lines than it is in the United States.
Has the Distribution of Finish Times Changed From 2023 to 2024?
A third topic of interest is whether this year’s runners are faster than previous year’s.
In general, there’s lots of evidence that runners are getting faster. Boston, Chicago, and London have all announced that their qualifying times are changing, and Boston had a record number of applicants this year for the second time in a row.
So it’s worth asking whether, with the surge in participants at Berlin this year, these additional participants are on the fast side of things or not.
The visual below isolates runners under 40, and it plots the number of runners finishing in one minute intervals – from 2 hours to 6 hours. The number on the x axis indicates the number of minutes, so 179 represents any finish between 2:59:00 and 2:59:99.
Feature photo courtesy of BMW Berlin Marathon: ©SCC EVENTS / Jean-Marc Wiesner
Where the purple line is above the blue line, it indicates that the number of runners finishing at that time in 2024 is above the number finishing at that time in 2023.
And you can see plenty of spikes along the men’s line at fast times – like 2:39, 2:49 and 2:59. There are also spikes at 3:14 and 3:29.
But the biggest sustained increase is in the 3:30 to 4:00 range, and the number of finishers is consistently higher in 2024 down through the 5:00 range.
The bottom visual shows the number of women, and there’s a similar pattern.
There are lots of little spikes in the 3:00 to 3:30 range, but the biggest sustained increase is closer to 4:00. And those increases continue on towards 5:00.
So overall, there are many more fast runners. But there are also many more runners in the middle of the pack. Once you get past the five hour mark, or so, the increases seem to taper off.
Have More Data Questions About Berlin?
Again, this is only an excerpt of the data I collected and analyzed about the 2024 Berlin Marathon.
Check out the full analysis in Runners Life, and use this link to request a direct link behind the paywall if you’re not a Medium subscriber.
Some of the other questions I answered include:
- What’s the age distribution of runners and how does it vary with gender?
- What countries are the runners from, and is this different from 2023?
- How many runners finished under Berlin Marathon’s qualifying times for “fast runners”?
And for an added bonus, check out this dashboard on Tableau Public. It enables you to explore the dataset yourself directly.
If you have other questions or some observations of your own, leave a comment below. Questions from readers often drive what I analyze in the future. In fact, it was a question from a reader about the Boston Marathon results that led me to segment the data by nationality and look at the gender distribution.
Check back in the coming weeks for similar analyses of Chicago and New York City. And wish me luck – because I’ll be one of the many participants in Chicago this year.