Are you seeing an unusual amount of 26.2 bumper stickers on the roads lately? That’s because more people in the U.S. than ever before can call themselves a marathoner. 

According to Running USA’s “2014 Annual Marathon Report,” 550,637 runners finished a 26.2 race last year, up more than 9,000 finishers from 2013. This continues 38 years of growth, with the exception of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy canceled the NYC Marathon. In 1976, the earliest year covered by the report, just 25,000 runners crossed a marathon finish line.

Predictably, average finishing times for both men and women have slowed as new runners make their debut at the distance. In 1980, the men’s average finishing time was 3:32:17 and the women’s was 4:03:39. In 2014, those times increased to 4:19:27 for men and 4:44:19 for women, up about three minutes from 2013 for both genders.

The increase in total finishers can largely be attributed to growing field sizes in the country’s biggest races—NYC’s 50,386 field size was the largest marathon ever—and a wider variety of races. In 2014 runners could pick between more than 1,200 marathons, compared to just 300 in the year 2000.

For those who want a speedy field, Boston continued its streak as the fastest marathon on the list, with an average finish time of 3:52:09, followed by the Baystate Marathon in Lowell, Massachusetts, at 3:53:05 and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley Via Marathon at 3:54:24.

The number of female marathoners also continues to grow, comprising 43 percent of finishers in 2014, compared to just 10 percent in 1980. Women represented the strongest at the Wineglass Marathon in upstate New York, making up 60 percent of the field.

Headshot of Kit Fox
Kit Fox
Special Projects Editor

Kit has been a health, fitness, and running journalist for the past five years. His work has taken him across the country, from Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, to cover the 2016 Olympic Trials to the top of Mt. Katahdin in Maine to cover Scott Jurek’s record-breaking Appalachian Trail thru-hike in 2015.