I saw recently that there were record numbers applying for the London Marathon. I myself am part of the problem as I put my name down this year 😱.
And as it happens, I had previously pulled together the data on this and charted it. So here is an updated view as a Plotly chart!
It almost seems to be increasing exponentially in the last few years! I wonder what the driver of its increasing popularity is?
One thing I might add to this chart is a line on a secondary axis that represents that applicant-accepted multiple. For example 2025 the multiple must be like 16x (16:1).
How did I make this chart?
At work I’m forever making cool charts with Python, and so naturally I wanted to figure out how I could put similar charts onto my personal Hugo site here.
The chart is made in Python using plotly and then written out into .json. I won’t go into the details here. In case you are interested, thankfully lots of other people have tackled explaining this already:
Sources
- London Marathon Data - If anyone can find the missing years of 2021, 2022 and 2023 then please update wikipedia!