Running demographics – latest data

Time for an update of the latest running demographics in England, drawing on insights gleaned from Sport England’s massive Active Lives Survey.

I’ve broken runners down into five categories, which helps to illustrate the social diversity within the sport.

Overall participation

These are the figures for participation (any time in the last 12 months) in various forms of running in England in 2023.

There’s some overlap between the two biggest categories – running/jogging and treadmill. Roughly half of treadmill runners also classified themselves as runners/joggers. The fact that around half did not is interesting in itself! I’ll look into this more in a later post.

Compared to previous years, running/jogging is down a little, but treadmill use has increased by about a third in the last two or three years. Another interesting result that’s worth a deep dive later.

Overall, participation rates remain below their pre-Pandemic peaks, aside from Triathlon, which is now tracking at about – or just above – 2019 levels.

Gender split

Overall, there remains a slight majority of male runners. About four in seven runners are men. However, there are big differences between different forms of the sport. In Mountain (fell) racing and triathlon, men outnumber women two-to-one, whereas obstacle course racing and treadmill in particular are much more evenly balanced.

Age

This chart shows the ratio of participation rates for younger people (under 35) compared to older people (55+). So, for instance, younger people are 9 times more likely to participate in obstacle course races than older people, but only about 3 times as likely to do mountain running.

As you might expect, track athletes are a lot younger than most other kinds of runner. But it is a bit of a surprise to see obstacle course racing so close behind. In fact, these two sports have quite different age profiles if you look into the finer detail, as I do in this post. They look so similar here because we are comparing runners over 55 (who rarely do either of these forms) with under 35s as a whole, which obscures the much younger centre of gravity in athletics.

Socioeconomic class

Finally, here’s are a couple of snapshots that help to illustrate differences in the socioeconomic status of participants in different kinds of running.

The chart above show the ratios of people from affluent areas to people from deprived areas in terms of their likelihood of taking part in the sport. So for instance, people from affluent areas are about 2.3 times more likely than people from deprived areas to take part in mountain running.

And this chart shows the ratio of people with professional/white collar jobs (NS-SEC 1-2) to those who do manual, technical or unskilled work (NS-SEC 5-8). Broadly this reflects high and low status jobs. So you can see that treadmill use is twice as common among people with high status jobs than it is among low status workers.

Considered together, these charts clearly show mountain running and triathlon to be the forms of the sport that attract people of the highest status. Triathlon is especially privileged, with white collar workers 8 times more likely to participate than manual workers.

Partly this is about cost – triathlon can be a very expensive sport. But other factors like the availability of free time and spare energy, as well as the image and ethos of the sport likely play a role too.

Track running maintains a fairly even appeal across the socioeconomic scale, but overall the landscape of running remains one riven by class. You may only need a “pair of trainers and a front door” to take up the sport but that doesn’t prevent invisible barriers making it feel a lot more accessible – and appealing – to some groups than others.