Canadians among world’s quickest runners

Canadian runners are among the quickest recreational runners in the world.

On Monday, Danish statisticians released their findings on recreational athletes from all over the world on recreational runners and Canada is among the top-performing nations.

The data shows the results of the all marathon finishers in 12 large marathons around the world between 2009 and 2014: Chicago, Marine, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Athens, Amsterdam, Budapest, Warsaw and Madrid. Any athletes designated as elite were stripped from the results and countries which has fewer than 10 male of female finishers in a year were omitted. In the end, there were nearly 2.2 million results.

Overall, Canadian recreational runners averaged 4:04:29 over the 42.2K distance between 2009 and 2014, good for eighth among the 47 countries, though that doesn’t tell the entire story. Canada, behind only the United states, has the narrowest male-female divide in number of finishers by gender. Among Canadians, 44.4 per cent of marathon finishers were women. Many of the countries quicker than Canada skew heavily towards male finishers. The two countries with the fastest average times, Spain and Portugal, also see very few women run the marathon. In Spain 93.6 per cent of finishers are men, only slightly higher than Portugal’s 91.9 per cent. This pulls the average finishing times down substantially.

When looking at genders individually, Canadian women were the second fastest, behind only the Icelandic women. Canadian women averaged 4:19:12, well below the global average of 4:42:33. Canada’s men were the third fastest, behind Iceland and Luxembourg, averaging 3:52:44. The global average was 4:13:23.

Still, we might not always be among the fastest. Canadians didn’t get a lot faster during the six-year span. Many of the countries that had slightly slower numbers improved much more.