Will Canadian Runners Skip the 2026 Boston Marathon?

With the Boston Marathon registration period opening on Monday, I’ve been trying to tie up a few loose ends when it comes to predicting the cutoff time for 2026. One of those unanswered questions was how much the Sydney Marathon results would matter. Another is whether Canadian runners will choose to skip Boston.

Earlier this year, the relationship between the United States and Canada was, shall we say, at a nadir. For our purposes today, we’re not going to delve into the politics of the situation. But suffice it to say that there was a lot going on in the news and tensions were high.

Have Canadian Travel Patterns Changed?

If you just read the news, the argument seems plausible. For the last few months, there’s been a steady stream of articles and headlines declaring a decline in Canadian tourism to the United States.

In March, the New York Times reported that Canadian airlines were reducing flights to the United States in April in anticipation of lower demand. The reductions ranged from 7% to 25% at different airlines, and data also showed the number of car trips across the border was down significantly in February.

More recently, NPR published an article headlined, “Far fewer Canadians are visiting the U.S. this year, new numbers show.” Canadian data showed a decline in car trips across the border in July, and American data showed a general decrease of 17% in Canadian visits to the United States from January to May.

Forbes offered a slightly more ominous headline – “Canadian Car Visits to the U.S. Plunge 37% in July – Seattle, Portland, Detroit Hit Hardest.” Closer to home, New Jersey news outlets were reporting that the Jersey shore expected to have a bad year due to Canadian travelers vacationing elsewhere.

While there’s no denying that many metrics show a decline in Canadian tourism to the United States, it’s easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom. Car visits and day trips aren’t necessarily the most relevant data points for us. Traveling to a destination race – especially Boston – is likely a longer trip involving a flight.

Statistics Canada releases data on the number of Canadian residents returning to the country from the United States by plane on a daily basis. I collected the data through the end of July and graphed it below. The data is aggregated by week, to make it easier to see the difference year over year.

In general, the trend is towards fewer trips in 2025. But the difference isn’t huge. A few weeks have a difference of about 5%, but many weeks are lower than that.

Across the board – from January through the end of July – there were 11.35 million trips in 2024 and 11.20 million trips in 2025. That’s an overall decline of just 1.3%.

When you look specifically at people who are planning longer trips and traveling by plane, there’s only a mild decline in travel. This is a very different picture from the one painted by the headlines – which is often driven by the decline in car travel and trips across the border.

Have the Number of Canadian Runners at American Races Changed?

But looking at general travel patterns of Canadian residents only tells half the story. Although it’s possible that you can generalize from those patterns to predict what marathon runners will do, it’s also possible that marathon runners have different priorities that influence their decision making process.

Since we’re most keenly interested in what marathon runners will do, we should look at some data related to what they’ve done in the past nine months.

Earlier this year, I ran the NYC Half. While I was on the subway down to the start, I noticed a runner wearing a Canadian flag bandana. It occurred to me that the two main NYRR Half Marathons – NYC and Brooklyn – are big, destination races that could attract a significant number of international runners.

So this is a good place to start. The visual below shows the number of finishers at each of these two races for the last three years. I’ve broken out Canadian and Mexican runners specifically, and all other international runners are combined into one group. Note that the x-axis is different for each of the four graphs.

Pretty much across the board, there has been a gradual year over year increase in the number of international runners.

Zeroing in on Canadian runners in particular, the number at Brooklyn has been pretty constant. But it jumped by a significant number from 2023 to 2024 and from 2024 to 2025.

Of the two races, the United NYC Half attracts far more international runners. Across the board (Canadian, Mexican, and other countries), those numbers increased about 10% from 2024 to 2025. In that same time period, the number of American finishers only increased by 2.5%.

Based on these race results, I think it’s fair to say that Canadian runners continued to run these NYRR races at similar – or slightly higher – this year. And across the board, there’s no evidence of any slump among international runners in general.

One other related data point is the New York City Marathon lottery. This year, a record 200,000 runners applied – another significant year over year increase. I reached out to NYRR to see if they could release any statistics on where the applicants were from, and they declined to share specific numbers. But they did confirm “that the number of international runners who have registered for the lottery the last couple of years (2023-2025) has consistently increased.”

While I wasn’t able to get NYRR to specifically provide insights into the trends among Canadian runners, this is another data point that suggests that demand among international runners remains high.

What About Other American Marathons?

That’s just three races. And maybe there’s something special about New York. Of course, there’s something special about Boston, too … but we’ll ignore that for the moment.

We are now eight months into the year and we have results from quite a few races. A lot of big races won’t take place until the fall, but I identified 11 American races from earlier this year that had some meaningful number of Canadian runners in the 2024 race.

Note that there were a few other races I wanted to use as a reference point, but they did not release reliable data on the country a runner is from. So this is the best I could come up with.

The red bar indicates the number of Canadian finishers in 2024 and the blue bar indicates the number of Canadian finishers at that same race this year.

One thing that’s worth pointing out is that there just aren’t that many Canadian finishers at most American races. When you look at most of these races, the majority of the results are from local runners who live in the same state. There are plenty of large Canadian races, so a majority of Canadian runners likely run those – unless they’re traveling for a huge destination race like New York, Chicago, or Boston.

When you run down this list, it’s a mixed bag. Some races saw an increase (6) and some races saw a decrease (4). San Francisco had exactly the same number of Canadian runners in each year (62).

If you total things up, there was a combined total of 647 Canadian finishers in 2024 and 617 in 2025. That’s an overall decrease of 30 – or about 5%.

Based on this data, I’d draw a couple of conclusions.

First, there has been a small decline in the number of Canadian runners participating in American marathons so far this year – at least in this sample of races. A large chunk of the decline is isolated in two races (Buffalo and Fargo), and they could be outliers. But this still provides a general baseline for what the decline might be – about 5%.

Second, the corollary to that is that the vast majority of Canadian runners who run American races are not avoiding them this year. Hundreds of Canadian runners chose to travel to the United States for one of these medium sized, regional races.

Collectively, this suggests that there could be a small decline in Canadian participation – but it’s unlikely to crater altogether.

What Happened At the 2025 Boston Marathon?

In the spring, this was a hot topic of conversation leading up to the 2025 Boston Marathon. There was some anticipation that runners might choose to boycott that race – even though they’d already registered for the race and likely booked travel arrangements.

First, some historical context. Since 2017, the number of Canadian runners at Boston has declined and the number of other international runners has increased. I offered some more detail in this analysis, but in 2017-18 there were ~1,900 Canadian runners starting Boston. From 2023-25, that number was ~1,500.

Meanwhile, the number of runners from outside the United States, Canada, and Great Britain increased from ~3,000 to ~6,000. So Canadian runners have made up a smaller part of the Boston field and they (along with American runners) have been displaced by international runners from other countries.

But more to the point – how many of the Canadian runners who registered for the 2025 Boston Marathon chose not to run? According to BAA’s statistics, 1,756 Canadian runners were registered for the race and 1,550 of them actually started. That’s a did not start (DNS) rate of 11.7%.

But what does that mean in context?

The visual above shows the DNS rate for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the rest of the world from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, and 2025. The full statistics weren’t available for 2024, and I ignored 2021-22 because of COVID.

Among Canadian runners, this year is the highest. It’s typically been between 8-10%. Although I couldn’t find the full statistics for 2024, I did find a Facebook post in which someone shared that the DNS statistics for Canadian runners in 2024 was 9.9% (of 1,705 registrants).

When you look at the other three groups, there’s some noise in the chart and some variation. But in general the DNS rate is anchored around 10%.

So the share of Canadian runners who were registered for Boston and did not start was slightly higher than normal. There are lots of reasons one might not start a race, and they’re likely accounted for in the typical 10%. So the additional 2% could potentially be the result of current events.

So Are Canadian Runners Likely to Skip Boston 2026?

To the general question of whether Canadian runners are likely to skip Boston en masse, I’d respond with a resounding no. I just don’t think there’s any evidence to support that conclusion at all.

Tourism from Canada to the United States is down, but when you zero in on travelers with long term plans there’s only a modest decline. The number of Canadian runners at the NYC Half Marathon this spring was up year-over-year, and an analysis of 11 other American marathons showed only a modest decline in participation by Canadian runners. And at the 2024 Boston Marathon, the DNS rate among Canadian runners was abnormally high, but only a couple percentage points higher than usual.

To the extent that there is an impact, it’ll likely be modest. The vast majority of Canadian runners who registered for Boston made the trip in April, and many Canadian runners traveled south of the border this year for other races in San Francisco, Snoqualmie, and Eugene.

I think an estimate of a 10% decline is too high. There’s just not a lot of evidence to support that. A 5% reduction in the number of Canadian applicants is more believable, and even then I’d wager that’s the high end of the possible range of outcomes.

For the sake of argument, let’s run with that estimate. There were approximately 1,800 Canadian runners registered for the 2025 Boston Marathon. Only 2/3 of qualified applicants were accepted, so there could have been as many as 2,700 Canadian applicants. But at least some number of those runners would have come from other form of entry other than time qualification (i.e. charity or international tour operators).

So let’s assume that the actual number of qualified applicants from Canada is between 2,000 and 2,500. A 5% reduction in the number of applicants would mean about 100 to 125 fewer applicants.

In the scheme of things, that’s a meaningless number when it comes to calculating the cutoff time. It’s the equivalent of about 3 to 5 seconds. It might make the difference for someone on the margin, but it’s not a meaningful amount in the big picture.

If 50% of Canadian applicants chose to boycott Boston, that would translate into a 30 to 40 second reduction in the cutoff time. That’s a more meaningful number, but it’s also a wildly unrealistic outcome.

Some Final Thoughts On the Question

Let me wrap things up with two final thoughts.

First, remember that running Boston is qualitatively different from other types of travel. If you’re Canadian, and you were considering a trip to the Jersey Shore or to Las Vegas, you’ve got plenty of other options.

But Boston is Boston. It’s a unique experience, and for a runner who has been trying to qualify … it’s irreplaceable. For this reason, you’d expect marathon runners – and Boston qualifiers in particular – to be much more likely to continue with their travel than the average Canadian.

Second, remember that the majority of people just don’t care that strongly about things. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment, but it takes a lot for news and politics to break through to the general population.

Some of the runners you know may have very strong opinions on current events, but I guarantee you that many of them … just don’t care. Combine that with the fact that running is a hobby that cuts across the political spectrum, and I’d hazard a guess that there are some runners out there who don’t even know why this is a question.