Wolkberg Trail Run
April 17, 2026
27 April 2026 | Rudolph Van Rensburg
Running has more numbers attached to it than almost any other sport. Pace, heart rate, cadence, splits, vert, threshold, lactate, weekly load. Most of those are about you.
This piece is not about you. This is about the sport itself, and the data behind what is actually happening out there.
Some of these numbers will surprise you. A couple of them will probably annoy you. All of them are worth knowing if you take this thing seriously.
The worldwide average sat at around 4 hours 34 minutes in 2024, the men’s median was 4:10. The women’s median was 4:38, based on a RunRepeat analysis of more than 1.2 million finishers across 50 countries.
And the longer trend is the part most runners get wrong. The global average has actually been getting slower for two decades, not faster. From around 3:52 in 1986 to over 4:30 today. That is more than half an hour added on, on average, in a generation.
This is not because runners got worse. It is because the marathon stopped being a sport reserved for the obsessed. More people lined up. The average shifted. The sport opened up.
The marathon got slower because more people started doing it.
That is a feature, not a failure.
Spend ten minutes on running social media and you will start to think a sub-3 marathon is the floor. It is not the floor. It is a small minority.
Across verified 2024 marathon results worldwide, only about 4.48% of finishers crossed the line in under 3 hours. Roughly 24% broke 4 hours.
That means three out of every four runners on a marathon start line are out there for longer than four hours. That is the actual sport. Anyone telling you otherwise is showing you the top 5% and calling it normal.
Multiple peer reviewed reviews put the annual injury incidence in recreational runners somewhere between 37% and 56%. A 2023 cross-sectional study of more than 600 adult runners found that 85% had a history of injury, and 44.6% had picked one up in the last 12 months.
The Garmin RUNSAFE study tracked thousands of runners and found that more than half had picked up a new injury within their first 1,000 kilometres of running.
Novice runners get hurt more than experienced ones. The injury rate per 1,000 hours of running is roughly 17.8 for new runners and 7.7 for recreational runners. The biggest predictor of getting hurt is not bad shoes or bad form. It is doing too much, too soon.
If you are 40 years old, running four times a week, and you have been injured at some point this year, you are not unlucky. You are statistically right in the middle.
That means three out of every four runners on a marathon start line are out there for longer than four hours. That is the actual sport. Anyone telling you otherwise is showing you the top 5% and calling it normal.
n a study of 3.5 million marathon results, the fastest male age group was 40 to 49, with an average finish of 4:11:19. The 30 to 39 group came second.
This is one of the most counterintuitive numbers in running. Most sports peak in the mid-20s. Marathon performance, on average, peaks much later, somewhere between 30 and 44 depending on the dataset. The decline after 35 is real, but slow. Roughly 7% to 10% per decade.
And it can be slowed. A 2021 study tracked runners who held sub-3 hour marathon fitness across five consecutive decades. Their performance dropped by an average of just 1 minute 4 seconds per year, or 0.67% slower per year. The thing they all had in common was consistent year-round training of 50 to 80 km a week, not seasonal block training.
Translation: the runner pulling away from you in the second half might be 47. That is not unusual. That is the data.
If you are running consistently and have been hurt this year, that is not bad luck.
That is the base rate.
This is the strangest demographic shift in running right now. The sport is being pulled in two directions at once.
At the New York City Marathon, 25- to 29-year-olds became the largest five-year age bracket on the start line in 2025, with nearly 11,000 finishers in that group alone. In 2022, only 17% of NYC finishers were under 30. By 2025, that was 24%.
At the same time, the over-60 group grew 88% at NYC over a decade. Women in their 60s grew by 159%. Women in their 70s grew by 250%.
The middle of the field, the traditional 35 to 44 marathoner, has actually shrunk as a proportion. The endurance community is no longer dominated by mid-career professionals chasing a PB. It is younger Gen Z first-timers and lifelong runners who never stopped, sharing the same start line.
The sport is being pulled in two directions. Younger first-timers and lifelong runners.
The middle is hollowing out.
Running is bigger, slower, older, younger, and more injured than the social media version of the sport suggests. The middle of the pack is the actual sport. The 4 hour 25 minute marathon is the real race.
None of this changes what you do tomorrow morning at 5am. But it might change the story you tell yourself about what is normal, what is impressive, and what counts as a serious runner.
Most of them, statistically, look a lot like you.
Sources
RunRepeat, The State of US Marathons 2025. Marathon Handbook, 2024 finish time analysis. Hoogkamer et al., Sports Medicine, 2018. Rodrigo-Carranza et al., meta-analysis on carbon plate shoes, 2021. Lepers, Burfoot and Stapley, age-related marathon performance, 2021. Garmin RUNSAFE Running Health Study. Sportico/Running Insight, NYC Marathon demographic analysis, 2025. RunnerClick global marathon study, 3.5 million results, 2014 to 2017.
