Half Marathon Converts

As I was posting the stats from the Flying Pig Half Marathon, I was wondering how many of these runners ran the 2004 Pig Marathon. Did more runners switch from the marathon to half marathon? Or did more runners stick with the marathon? Since this was the Flying Pig's first half marathon, there was no one who could do the opposite switch (half to full).

I ran the 2005 half marathon, the 2005 marathon, and the 2004 marathon results through my programs and I found the following:

# of marathon runners who ran both 04 and 05: 741
# of runners who ran marathon in 04 and the half in 05: 207

total 05 marathon finishers: 3740
total 05 half marathon finishers: 3729

% of marathon runners who had run in 04: 19.8%
% of half marathon runners who had run full marathon in 04: 5.6%

So over 3 times the number of runners decided to stick with the full marathon rather than switching to the half.

Perhaps after running the full marathon, it's somewhat of a letdown to run the half in the same race where the full is being run. As mentioned in comments from a previous post, marathon runners often use halfs to help them train. But are marathon runners more likely to run halfs in standalone half marathon races or in races that have both full and half marathons?

One thing I still need to look at is the Flying Pig 10Ks in 2004 and 2005. How many 2004 10K runners decided to run the 2005 half or full marathons?

Note, exact ages were not available in the race results so I wasn't able to use ages with the names to help against counting two people with the same name as a repeat runner. So there could be a few cases of counting different people as the same runner in 04 and 05.

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