With the extra time that some of us have been granted by government, we decided to map the marathon “maniacs” efforts from the Spanish runners.
To do so we used the data uniquely from the runners with more than 50 marathons, according to the “official” (kind of) rankings in the web (125 runners):
Obviously, there were different ways to use the data, and an important limitation, as this ranking ONLY considers runners with 50 or more marathons completed. Doing a full analysis with every runner in the country would be out of our reach.
As for the population data we used the last numbers (2018) from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística.
Firstly, we performed and analysis for autonomous regions (17 in total), correcting the marathons for the population, and represented the data in a heat map. We found that the correction by population was a way to average most populous areas with the less populated ones. The highlights would be:
- Castilla-Leon tops the ranking with 69 marathons per 100 thousand people.
- La Rioja and Comunidad Valenciana completes the podium, but La Rioja gets its second position with a unique athlete (Antonio Tarazona).
- Cataluña and Madrid have almost identical marathon levels per population.
- Baleares is the only region without runners with more than 50 marathons in the ranking.
Secondly, we followed the same procedure for provinces (50 plus Ceuta and Melilla) and elaborated a top 10 ranking.
Up to 14 provinces didn´t have any runner in the rankings at the time of writing this article: in Andalucía: Almería, Granada, Huelva, Málaga; in Aragón: Huesca; Baleares; in Cataluña: Tarragona; in Castilla la Mancha: Albacete, Cuenca, Guadalajara; in Castilla y León: Ávila; and in Galicia: A Coruña, Lugo, Pontevedra.
Highlights of this classification corrected again by population:
- At the top of the rankings is surprisingly Soria, thanks to its low population and a superb Antonio Huerta with 197 marathons.
- Ourense and Burgos complete the podium.
- Castellón is in fourth place with a total of 594 marathons, of which Santi Hitos has run 310.
- Castilla y León introduces also Segovia (with only Javi Sanz and 129 marathons) and Valladolid in the top 10, while País Vasco introduces also 2 of its 3 provinces into the top 10: Álava and Guipúzcoa.
- Valencia closes the top 10 with a total of 1389 marathons, that are somehow diluted by its high population.
Let´s the Marathon Games begin!!!
(when can run again)
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