The Abbott World Marathon Majors are more popular than ever. The original five races – Boston, New York, Chicago, London, and Berlin – has now been expanded to a total of seven races. Tokyo joined the list in 2013 and, starting in 2025, the Sydney Marathon will also be an official Major. These races attract … Read more
The Tableau dashboard below collects data from marathons, tracks the number of finishers who meet their Boston qualifying time, and projects an estimated cutoff time for the 2026 Boston Marathon. It will be updated regularly throughout the year, through the registration period in September 2025. For more details on the data, the assumptions, and other … Read more
Last week, I published a brief analysis of the Valencia Marathon’s field – comparing it to other large races like Berlin, Chicago, and London. The takeaway – the Valencia Marathon has more sub-3:00 finishers than any other race in the world. Drilling down to young men, it has a very high percentage of runners going … Read more
Finding good stats on the largest marathons in the United States is – for some reason – difficult. A few years ago, I found myself looking for a list of the largest races. What I ended up finding was a bunch of listicles with mixed and match different methodologies of counting. Some races include multiple … Read more
The Valencia Marathon has a reputation for being fast. Still, I was a surprised when I saw a headline that there were over 5,000 runners finishing sub-3:00 at this year’s race. Just how fast was this year’s Valencia Marathon? Most of my data analysis has focused on American marathons, plus the Abbott World Majors. Although … Read more
This year, there were a record number of qualifiers who applied to run the Boston Marathon. That led to a steep cutoff time of 6:51 for the 2025 race and new qualifying times for the 2026 race and beyond. A lot of people, myself included, hoped that would bring the cutoff time for future races … Read more
Last month, I wrote up a short analysis of both the number of women and the number of men finishing at specific fast times at the New York City Marathon. The gist of it was this: There was a huge surge in the number of women finishing under 3:00 and men finishing under 2:40. At … Read more
Feature image by nakashi on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 The World Marathon Majors certainly have one thing in common — they’re all very popular. This year saw a record number of applicants at many of the world’s largest races. Whether it’s New York City, Chicago, Boston, London, Tokyo, or Berlin — or now, Sydney — … Read more
When the world shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it sent shockwaves through the running community – is it did through the world. Although running is an activity that can be pursued alone, much of the enthusiasm and popularity around the sport is driven by large in person events. In particular, people … Read more
Last weekend was the Philly Marathon. This is the last large race in the fall marathon season. I didn’t run this year, although I did run the race back in 2022. But I happened to be in the city, and I got a chance to spectate for a change. The weather was beautiful – slightly … Read more