COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - (May 9, 2012) - With more than 7 million female U.S. road race finishers in 2011, a record high according to Running USA, it's difficult to imagine that just 40 years ago running was not widely considered an appropriate sport for women. The longest distance women were allowed to run in the 1960 Rome Olympics was just 800 meters, and later, until the marathon and 3000 meters were added at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the 1500 meters.

K Ken Nakamura/Japan is one of the leading athletics statisticians in the world. His contributions and statistics on the qualitative development of the marathon are especially important today, as one world-class time follows another at marathon races around the world.

The creation of the "Laufmarkt"-Database started in 2006. At the time being, it contains information about a panel of approximately 400 running events in Germany for the years 2003 to 2012. The amount of data available materializes in more than 24000 data sets. The data base is updat

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - (March 21, 2012) - Running USA's third annual Half-Marathon Report shows that the 13.1 mile distance had another year of impressive growth, but like U.S. marathons in 2011, the growth rate wasn't as large as recent years. Last year, U.S. half-marathons had an estimated 1.6 million finishers (a new high), an impressive 16.2% increase from 2010 (1,385,000 to 1,610,000), but lower than the historic 24% rise in both 2009 and 2010. Also, in the same 870 U.S. half-marathons for 2010 vs. 2011, there was a 6.4% finisher increase (1,264,907 vs. 1,346,280).

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - (February 26, 2012) - Over the past decade, marathons in the U.S. and worldwide have been part of the Second Running Boom's unprecedented upward trend line, and 2011 was another year of growth in U.S. marathons with an estimated record 518,000 finishers or a 2.2% increase from 2010, a modest increase compared to recent years (9.9% in 2009 and 8.6% in 2010). See U.S. marathon finisher table further below.

The winning time was third fastest in history of Tokyo Marathon.

For years, German Road Races (GRR) has been publishing a monthly “Running Market” (“Laufmarkt”) by Dr. Roland Döhrn, with the current evaluations of the German running scene and his interpretations of the trends in the world of running. The top 10 German races for each of the categories 10K, half marathon and marathon are published on the front page of the GRR website, along with the largest running events, and at the link “GRR Statistics” we have provided a full overview of the 100 events for each of the disciplines from the “Laufmarkt” (as we have done for the past several years).

Averaging the top-10 (male) performances for some of the world's fastest marathons shows that Frankfurt is the race where performances have improved most in the last three years.

Russia's Anna Chicherova bounced back from missing 2010 owing to being pregnant in the best possible way.

It was not the best of years for European runners at this distance. Spain's SPAR European Team Championships winner Dolores Checa was the only woman under 15 minutes with her time of 14:46.30 at the Samsung Diamond League meeting in Oslo.