Women’s participation in trail running jumps 8 per cent in six years, say ITRA statistics
- Trail running’s de facto governing body has released statistics around age, gender, number of runners and races, finishers and more
- The International Trail Running Association supports millions of trail races and allocates Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc points
The proportion of women in trail running has grown by 8 per cent, according to statistics released by the International Trail Running Association (ITRA). The sports de facto governing body has released an infographic with a host of graphs, numbers and statistics.
In 2013, just 18 per cent of runners were women but that number rose to 26 per cent in 2019. Not all races subscribe to ITRA, so this is taken from five million results, and 1.77 million runners across 25,700 races in 195 countries or autonomous regions.
Finland leads the way in gender diversity, with women making up 43 per cent of runners. That is followed by Australia (41 per cent), Argentina and Canada (39 per cent) and New Zealand (38 per cent).
Women who trail run are, on average, 39 years old and men are 40.
ITRA assigns points to every runner, saying it is an objective way to compare runners who are not racing against each other. The score is out of 1,000. Men and women are considered elite if their scores are over 825 or 700 respectively.
There are 513 elite men – spanning 52 countries – and 258 elite women, spanning 34. The former’s average age is 30.5 and the latter’s is 31.8. The youngest elite man is just 18 years old, and the youngest woman is 20. The oldest man is 51 and the woman is 49.
Europe has the highest average score of 443 and Asia has the lowest of 362. North America sits at 442, Australia at 438, Africa at 408 and South America at 393.
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Overall, the average scores have dropped from 454 to 430 since 2015, as the number of runners with a score has almost doubled from nearly 600,000 to around 1.1 million.
