Participation in America’s running races took a hit from the pandemic and its aftermath, but race officials say rebounding registration numbers for Colorado’s two largest road races, and others around the country, demonstrate the sport is thriving again.
“It’s back,” said Andrea Dowdy, executive director of Denver Colfax Marathon, “and in a lot of cases, it seems like a resurgence.”
Registration for the Colfax Marathon and its associated events — a half marathon, 10-miler, 5K and marathon relay races, all of which will be held this weekend — have surpassed 24,000. The Colfax races set a record last year with 21,000.
The Bolder Boulder Memorial Day 10K attracted 47,250 in 2019 and dipped to less than 34,000 when the race came back in 2022. Last year, though, it registered more than 40,000, and race director Cliff Bosley said this year’s numbers are tracking with 2019.
“We’re prepared for upwards of 45,000,” Bosley said. “We’ve added 13 more start waves to accommodate a larger field, we’ve ordered more shirts, and we are planning to pack more than 45,000 snack bags.”
The Colfax Marathon races sold out last year. This year organizers redrew one of the courses to eliminate a bottleneck so the race could accommodate more runners.
What Colfax and the Bolder Boulder are seeing is being felt across the country. Eric Cone of RunSignup, the country’s largest race registration platform, said large events such as Colfax and Bolder Boulder are seeing 10% to 15% growth, while smaller races are seeing 7% to 9% percent increases.
” A lot of major races across the country are just seeing so much interest in participation,” Dowdy said. “Running has really come back strong since the pandemic.”
The London Marathon in April broke its record for finishers at 53,000, which was 9,000 more than the previous record for the event set last year. More than 840,000 entered the lottery to get into next year’s race, an increase of 45% over the previous year.
“We could be in the third running boom,” Bosley said.
The first running boom occurred in the 1970s, when there was an explosion of runners and races. The second occurred in the late 1990s an early 2000s. Cone said running seems poised for more growth, in part because of demographics.
Baby Boomers are starting to age out of running, he said, and Gen X was a smaller cohort, but Millennials and Gen Z are larger.
“Millennials are starting to come into their prime running and buying power, therefore we should see significant growth over the coming years as that purchasing power starts to get into the market of running,” Cone said. “We’re in a pretty good spot. Don’t get me wrong, the last four years have been pretty rough for a number of (running) organizations, but I suspect that over the next five to 10 years, we should see consistent growth, very much like the early 2000s.”
