Some stats for marathons in the USA and how they compare to marathons in Ireland...

The Running USA annual marathon report for 2014 was released recently and it shows the current state of marathon running in the States.

Some stats....
a) There was a record number of finishers in US marathons in 2014, up 1.8% on the previous year.

b) There were over 1200 marathons organised in the US in 2014.

c) 43% of all finishers were women which is much higher than it is in Ireland. In the 2014 Dublin City Marathon, 30.3% of the finishers were women. In Cork, the percentage of women at 21.9% was even lower as you can see from this chart below...

d) The average age of marathon finisher was 40 for men and 36 for women. I'm not sure of the Irish stats but I wouldn't expect it to be much different.

e) The average finish time for men was 4:19:27 for men and 4:44:19 for women. Taking together, this gives an average finish time of about 4h 30m.Compare that to the times below from the Cork City marathon in 2011 and 2012. You can see that the average time for a finisher in the US is about 40 minutes slower than in Cork.

Cork Marathon

There were the 15 largest marathons in the world in 2014. Note there 5 of them were in Japan.

2014 World’s Largest Marathons (finishers):
1) New York City, NY 50,386  (largest all-time)
2) Chicago, IL 40,595
3) Paris, FRA 38,575
4) London, GBR 35,878                       
5) Tokyo, JPN 34,097
6) Boston, MA 31,932
7) Berlin, GER 28,984
8) Osaka, JPN 28,076
9) Honolulu, HI 21,814
10) Los Angeles, CA 21,508
11) Naha, JPN 20,027
12) Marine Corps, Washington DC 19,689
13) Walt Disney World, FL 19,201
14) Kobe, JPN 17,027
15) Ibusuki Nanohana, JPN 16,472

To put the Dublin City marathon in context, it had 12586 finishers in 2014. Only 7 of the marathons in the USA were bigger than it which is pretty impressive.

U.S. Largest Marathons in 2014 (finishers):
1) TCS New York City, NY 50,386
2) Chicago, IL 40,595
3) Boston, MA 31,932
4) Honolulu, HI 21,814
5) ASICS LA, CA 21,508
6) Marine Corps, DC 19,689
7) Walt Disney World, FL 19,201
8) Philadelphia, PA 10,358
9) Medtronic Twin Cities, MN 8,842
10) Chevron Houston, TX 7,047