Some stats from the Dungarvan 10 race...

Following on from last weekends John Treacy Dungarvan 10 mile road race in West Waterford, I had a look at some of the stats for that race and compared it to the Ballycotton 10.

First of all, a breakdown of the finishers in Dungarvan by age...

Note that there was a F35 category for women whereas there was none for men. As a result, the SM (Senior Men) column looks very high as it includes all men under the age of 40. It's actually probably safe to assume that if there was a M35 category (35-39 year olds) then the men's graph might look like the women's one with the M35 column around the 150 mark and the SM column around 200.

The one thing about the graph above though is that the number of people aged 34 and under seems a bit low. For example, this graph below from an earlier post shows the breakdown of female entries to the 2013 Ballycotton 10 mile road race...

Note that this is for entries to the Ballycotton 10 race whereas the Dungarvan graph is for finishers. Still though, if you look at the graph for women finishing in Dungarvan then it looks a lot more like the club entries for Ballycotton than the non-club.

This got me thinking that perhaps Dungarvan had a lot more club entries as a percentage than Ballycotton? Going through the results, there are some listings where the person may be in a club or may just be from a town. e.g. Midleton.....Are they in Midleton AC or not? Even allowing for this, I got a figure of roughly 58% for club membership amongst finishers in Dungarvan.

Looking at the Ballycotton 10 results for 2012, we can see that the club membership is almost the exact opposite of Dungarvan...

The above graph shows it clearly. About 58% of the finishers in the 2013 Dungarvan 10 were members of an athletics club whereas only 42% were members of clubs in the 2012 Ballycotton 10 race. This would also help explain why the Senior Male and Senior Female numbers in Dungarvan seemed too low as the average club runner is older than the average non-club runner......(but that's a story for another post ;o)

Why though does Ballycotton have so many more non-club runners? When you consider that the Ballycotton 10 organisers actually give club athletes more time to enter then it might seem strange why the non-club runners should dominate.

The only reason I can think of is that there is a huge pool of non-club runners living in or near Cork City that enter the Ballycotton 10 race as it's 'local', it has a long history and it's so well known. The Dungarvan race by contrast has only got very popular relatively recently and maybe isn't as well known. It might also be perceived to be a bit far away from Cork City even though in reality, it's less than an hours drive.

Gender breakdown.....In the Dungarvan 10 race, women made up 38% of the finishers. The prize structure is set up so that outside of the John Treacy Trophy, women get 41% of the total number of prizes on offer. That's only slightly more than the 38% that finished.

How does the gender ratio compare to Ballycotton? Dungarvan at 38% is slightly behind Ballycotton where 39.9% of the entries this year were women. It's actually very close to the number of entries for the 2011 Ballycotton 10 so I don't think we can read much into it other than saying that they're pretty similar.

In summary....The Dungarvan 10 race has...
1) Women making up 38% of the field.
2) More club runners taking part than non-club runners.
3) Slightly older age profile compared to the Ballycotton 10 due to the higher percentage of club runners.

Where to now for the Dungarvan 10 race? For the last few years, the numbers have been creeping up and the entry limit has closed that little bit earlier every year. It probably can't handle much more in terms of numbers so if it does become more popular then the entry limit is likely to be reached earlier and earlier each year. If it starts to attract all those non-club runners like Ballycotton does then we could all be in a mad scramble to get in.