D.C.-area marathoners race 339,000+ miles in 2019

I’m sure in a few weeks, a lot of runners will be wishing for the kind of weather the 2019 Marine Corps Marathon had – heavy rains punctuated by muggy pauses. But we’ve had six months to bemoan the loss of most marathons this year. This is a chance to look back at where we ran in 2019.

The number of domestic marathon finishes by D.C.-area runners fell slightly, with at least 12,939 different finishes in 294 of 697 U.S. races, down from 12,981 finishes in 278 races. Some individual runners doubled, tripled, quadrupled and more, but they all added up to 12,932 finishes and 339,001.8 miles, not counting the extra miles they logged because they couldn’t run the tangents.

Of the 697 total domestic marathons, 177 did not detail finisher residences, and that surely undercuts the total count, which likely exceeds 13,000 finishes. None of this analysis would be possible without MarathonGuide.

That’s a slight drop from 12,981 finishers in 2018, which was a bigger drop from 14,044 in 2017.

We spent more than $2 million on registration fees and even more on flights, train rides, hotels, pre-race meals, shoes, clothes, gels and the massage appointments which follow the races.

Every state had a local finisher in 2019.

Where they ran:

• 91 races had only one local finisher (yellow)
• 153 have 2-25 (blue) with one possibly registering more than 25
• 39 had 26-99 (red)
• 13 had more than 100 (green)

I imagine compiling 2020’s statistics will be considerably faster.