We are preparing our yearly Race Trends Report for release at the RunningUSA conference. One of the stats is a comparison of races that happened in 2017 and 2018 where we could measure growth or decline.
The Top 1000 Races has a decline in participants of 2.5%, falling 44,589 to 1,777,344 participants.
We also track races that were held on RunSignup in 2017 and were renewed so we could measure both years. We saw a decline of 0.1%, falling 5,372 to 4,331,563 participants.
In addition, we began tracking the number of races over 500 held in 2017 that were not held in 2018. Of the 1,728 races on RunSignup in 2017 with over 500 participants, 118 were not held in 2018 – or 6.7%. We will keep generating this data and see what trend there is in future years.
These numbers support the general thesis of the race industry being generally flat to a small decline. RunSignup continues to work aggressively on building technology that helps races do better marketing and customer management, along with providing lots of innovation for race day.