Some stats for the 2018 Mallow 10 mile road race...

Following on from the 2018 Mallow 10 mile road race last Sunday, it's time to have a look at some stats!

First up, this is the breakdown by club of those that finished...

Last year, there were 20 clubs with 10 or more members. This year, it's 26. There were 7 clubs with 20 or more members last year while this year it's 9.

Almost 68% of the finishers are members of some type of club while just under 59% are actually members of an Athletics Ireland affiliated club.

Just over 1240 runners finished the race, almost exactly the same as last year.

In 2017, 46% of the finishers were women. That dropped this year to 43.4%.

In fact, the biggest drop in numbers seems to be younger women aged under 40.

As you can see from the chart above, the numbers for those aged 40 and above held up pretty well but those aged under 40 dropped.

For the men, the pattern is nearly the same with the decline in those aged under 40.

This follows a pattern for other races and club membership in that it shows that the average runner is getting older. The vast majority of adult members in athletic clubs are now what would be termed 'recreational runners' while the number of young adults actually involved in say track and field events is falling.

This is the breakdown of the finish times by gender in 5 minute increments.

The average woman was about 15 minutes slower than the average man which seems a lot, I would have expected something like a 10 minute difference for a 10 mile race. In fact, just 14 women broke 70 minutes which is pretty low considering that almost 540 women ran.

Overall, there are no big suprises in there, just a confirmation of existing trends. I'm not really sure why the number of younger adults is dropping. I'm assuming that it might be the fact that more people are now working compared to a few years back and younger adults are busier? Whatever the reason, that's the way things seem to be going at the moment.