Many of these are of course very small and only a relatively small number manage to attract in excess of 100 runners. With that in mind, I did a bit of digging and I have complied a chart which shows the relative size of each marathon in Ireland...
Dublin with it's 12,354 finishers in 2013 does of course dwarf the other Irish marathons in comparison. As I outlined in a post last April, Dublin was the 7th largest European Marathon of 2012 and attracts visitors from all over the world.
To get a clearer picture, I put together a second chart with Dublin removed...
Now the relative size becomes a lot clearer. There is a major step change from Belfast to Derry & Cork and then to the rest.
Notes...
1) Only marathons with over 100 finishers are shown.
2) Many of these events have half-marathons associated with them which usually get a lot more entrants. That being said, the purpose of this post is just to show the relative size of the marathon fields.
3) Clonakilty B2B were the Back to Back marathons on a weekend in Feb 2013.
If you are planning to do a Marathon in Ireland in 2014, at least now you can get an idea of just how big it's likely to be.
7 comments:
Nice work John. If I was asked I might have ranked a few of the differently just off the top of my head. It would be very interesting, but time consuming, to try to dig out this same data for the last three or four years. For example the Kildare and Longford marathons appear to be losing numbers -are the others remaining stable I wonder? Thanks again for this post John - as always top work!
We're well looked after in Munster with ten of the eighteen marathons. If you add Portumna which has a noon start, eleven are easily manageable as a day trip from Cork. How bad!
Excellent work there John. One has to wonder how sustainable some of these events are. nevertheless some of the smaller events are excellently run events - Connemara and Portuma come to mind.Dublin is the number one show though
What is a shame is the low numbers for the Cork event. it really underachieves and would benefit from a revamp
Numbers for the NI events are bigger in comparison to similar events in the south. Derry having more than Cork really surprised me. Maybe the higher cost of races down here is stopping runners from NI and the UK from taking part.
Surprise Kildare is so low. Ran the first one in 2011. Really good course. Very flat with only a few smile climber and very well organised. There was loads of support esp running through Newbridge and Kildare Finishing in The curragh Race course was great as there was plenty going on. Music etc. Price would be the only negative but most marathons are about the 60 euro mark.
The success of Derry probably owed a lot to its city of culture status and it having it's maiden marathon (no pun intended) on at the same time generated a lot of interest.
It is a shame about the Cork marathon underperforming but it seems to dogged with problems every year
Would love to see cork on the sunday. I personally will not do bank holiday monday nor most of my friends. Waiting all weekend to run and back to work day after. pls pls pls try it on a sunday for once, whatever time you want to start even 7am. Take away the other options and run them on the monday and make a weekend festival.. Something needs to change as it (the marathon) is dying a slow death.
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