Turkey Day is coming! We’re not the only ones noticing how many races there are on Thanksgiving Day: the New York Times acknowledged that for hundreds of thousands, Thanksgiving is now a day of running: http://tinyurl.com/qg6scls
Turkey Trot Race Directors: There’s a nice little survey at the bottom of the article to find out what Thanksgiving races people are doing, and if they’ve done it before. Share the article (and survey) with your runners on Facebook and email, and get your Turkey Trot on the map!
Just how popular is the Turkey Trot? According to the article, Running USA suggests that more than 786,000 runners crossed a finish line in 2014; 120,017 of those were registered in RunSignUp races. Based on the increase in registrations we saw between mid-October 2014 and Thanksgiving Day, we are estimating ~250,000 RunSignUp runners on Thanksgiving 2015.
Assuming that the total number of Thanksgiving runners stays flat in 2015 (it had fallen slightly from 2013-2014, but was still up 16% since 2011), those estimates put just over 30% of all Turkey Day runners registering on RunSignUp, which is unreasonably high. We think this might mean that it is time for RunningUSA to consider adding a metric for the number of people who register rather than finishers. The reason is that many runs do not report results, or do not have official times at all.
