by Brett Larner For more than 50 years the United States has led the world as its largest amateur marathon market, more people from around the world finishing marathons in the U.S. than in any other country. Always a strong home for elite marathoning , the launch of the Tokyo Marathon in 2007 sparked an incredible amateur running boom in Japan that coincided with a worldwide growth in the popularity of marathons. The Association of Road Racing Statisticians website tracks the number of marathon finishers by country worldwide, listing all marathons with results it can document. Below are the total number of marathon finishers worldwide, in the U.S.A. and in Japan over the last ten years using the ARRS numbers. Totals are number of finishers, not number of unique individuals to finish. Chinese and Korean races are relatively under-documented. During the ten years from 2006 to 2015 the number of marathon finishers worldwide more than doubled f...
the world's window into elite japanese distance running, since 2007