Out of pure boredom, I did some analysis of year-to-year race counts from 2008 to 2015 on TriFind.com:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hh9SvXvZpnIglbeRSDu1qZfN8HC3UxI4CTwpW_kmypU/edit?usp=sharing
Hopefully, folks can get to that link. Some caveats/disclaimers:
- The first chart is all races of all types, state-by-state and then added up. So, this includes mud runs, trail runs, etc. - anything that is listed on TriFind.com. Because this is state-by-state, it does not include international events.
- The last chart is the sum of the Sprint, Oly, Half, and Full numbers. These charts include international events.
- This obviously not hugely scientific - I don’t know what factors influence what races get included on TriFind.com. Perhaps they charge to list events and that cost has increased?
- This also doesn’t have anything to do with race costs, but just number of available races, for what it’s worth.
- The data is on the second tab, if you want to see the state numbers.
Looking at the number of all kinds of racing, it seems that endurance events have declined since 2013, and fairly significantly. Looking at the triathlons, specifically, the number of available events peaked in 2011, particularly with sprint and Olympic distances. Sprints have dropped off to before the 2008 levels, and Olys have dropped off to the 2009 level. Half-Iron and Full-Iron races had a bit different trend, mostly growing until 2014.
Like I said, I don’t know how much of this is actual race numbers or numbers of races being added to TriFind.com, but found it interesting.