21.1 How many run in the Comrades (Ultra)Marathon?

The data were scraped from the Marathon’s website (Comrades Marathon Association (2022)) and made available on Kaggle. More detailed data, including runners’ ages and split times for the 2019 race, have been analysed elsewhere (Collier (2019)).

The race was run for the first time in 1921 from Durban to Pietermaritzburg (“down”), with 16 runners finishing. In 1922 the race was run in the other direction (“up”). Mostly the directions alternated in successive years, but on three occasions they did not.

Figure 21.1 shows the numbers of finishers and the directions in each year. The race distance was not always the same and usually a little under 90 km.

Figure 21.1: Numbers of finishers of the Comrades Marathon and the race direction by year (dark orange is up, black is down).

Numbers remained low until the 1960s and rose sharply in the 1970s and 1980s (Figure 21.1). No races took place from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War. There was a sharp peak in the year 2000 when just over 20,000 finished, almost twice as many as in the surrounding years. There were two reasons. First, it was the 75th running of the race and there was much publicity, so many more entered. Second, the limit on finishing time was extended from 11 hours to 12 hours for that year. In 2019 there were 25,000 entrants (not all started) and over 16,000 finished. Detailed information can be found on the website for the race (Comrades Marathon Association (2022)) and some summary information on its Wikipedia page (Wikipedia (2022)).