The Great Running Boom: Why Millions Are Now Chasing 26.2 Miles

Getting into a major marathon has quietly become one of the toughest tickets in sport. Forget the playoffs or a heavyweight title fight; try, instead, to win a place on the start line in London or New York. The odds, as it turns out, are brutal, and they are getting worse every year.

That difficulty is the clearest symptom of a phenomenon reshaping athletics from the ground up: a global running boom of staggering scale. In this piece we lay out the numbers behind the surge, from record ballots to a worldwide explosion in participation, drawing entirely on published figures and reports.

A million and more, chasing London

Start with the headline that stunned even organisers. According to the reports, the public ballot for the 2026 London Marathon drew more than 1.1 million applications, a figure put precisely at 1,133,813. That is a world record for any marathon ballot, all for a race that can hold only around 60,000 runners.

Pause on that ratio for a moment. Well over a million people raising their hands for roughly sixty thousand spots means the overwhelming majority are destined for disappointment before a single stride is run. The demand for a simple race number has comprehensively outstripped anything the sport was built to supply.

New York's near-impossible odds

New York tells the same story in a different accent. The 2026 TCS New York City Marathon attracted over 240,000 applicants from more than 160 countries, itself a near 20 percent jump on the previous year. Runners are not just applying in one city, they are chasing places right across the globe.

The catch is that only around 1 percent of those hopefuls made it through the general drawing. That crush of demand followed the 2025 edition setting a world record as the largest marathon ever staged, with an astonishing 59,226 finishers crossing the line. Success, in effect, has only fuelled even fiercer competition to get in.

Chicago and the field records

Chicago rounds out the picture of American mania for the distance. The 2026 race reportedly drew around 160,000 applications for roughly 50,000 available places, another lopsided ratio that would have seemed fanciful only a decade ago, when organisers worried about filling fields rather than turning people away.

These are not isolated quirks of a few glamorous events. Taken together, the major marathons are all reporting the same thing: field sizes at or near record highs, and application numbers so large that the biggest challenge is no longer attracting runners, but disappointing the ones who cannot be accommodated.

A global surge, not just the majors

Zoom out from the famous races and the trend is even more striking. According to the reports, the number of people who say they run or jog rose from around 672 million in 2022 to nearly 785 million in 2025, meaning more than 110 million new runners took up the sport in just three years.

The growth is worldwide. The Cape Town Marathon, the reports note, has swelled from 13,000 runners in 2022 to 27,000 in 2026, while Sydney rocketed from 5,300 marathon runners in 2022 to 35,000 in 2025. Running's boom is not a story about a handful of rich cities, but a genuinely global movement.

Gen Z and the social run

So who are all these new runners? A striking share of them are young. According to Strava's Year In Sport report, the number of marathons recorded by Gen Z runners jumped by more than a third in 2025, as social media, run clubs and shared fitness apps turned a solitary slog into a communal, and very postable, activity.

The boom is also notably balanced. Among the United Kingdom applicants for the 2026 London ballot, 433,775 were men and 430,983 were women, with a further 5,044 non-binary applicants, a near-even split that shows running pulling in people from right across the spectrum rather than one narrow group.

The new mass sport

What we are watching, then, is running quietly becoming one of the defining mass-participation sports of the decade. Cheap to start, easy to share and open to almost anyone, it has tapped into a hunger for health, community and a concrete goal in a way few other activities can match.

The great challenge now is supply. With demand for the marquee races vastly outstripping the places available, the sport faces a happy but real dilemma: how to welcome a tidal wave of new runners without losing the magic that made them fall in love with 26.2 miles in the first place.