dreamfinder
Well-Known Member
I see no issues with that. @wdwmagic I think needs to do it though. I was trying to poke @Texas84 into posting his numbers. And it worked. ; )
Now having reviewed his data, I will probably challenge several points. Especially if you overlay this data with the info from my tracker thread, I think it puts some of it into perspective. For instance, 2015 and 2016 DLR half didn't sell out. So even if runDisney changed the caps, the participation demand just wasn't there.
First off, the "grand total" chart
Are you including events that are no longer held? IE ToT 13k/10M, Everest Challenge, etc? While those events were definitely smaller than a typical half marathon weekend, dropping an event that would have had say 8,000 participants and replacing it with one that has say 12,000 runners would show less of an upward trend than one that just adds the new race. I think you need to annotate each year with the number of events being counted. And then potentially show another line showing the average runner count per event. Helps to put participation into perspective. And also helps to show the event trend.
I don't think you need to adjust the Goofy. Assuming you are working off the PDFs, Dopey runners are excluded from the Goofy results.
But yet each year it still sells out. Need to still find those sellout dates again, but Princess has been their one tried and true gonna sell out event. And since each year it hits the cap, I'd suspect this is more a case of runDisney wanting/needing to cap total runners at a certain number. You can see that large increase in half runners the year before, which they then dropped back when they added the 10k.
But that 10% drop this past year for half runners is damning.
Overall, while the data is indeed interesting, still think it needs more. No way we can get really granular without "registered" numbers, weather etc (90+ degree day will cut out some of your finishers), but adding in info on if the race sold out will help to show if that limit was artificial (imposed by runDisney) or natural (lack of runner participating/engagement).
Any chance of getting you to post your source xls file? I'd love to monkey around with the data bit and am too lazy to dig through all the older results. Nice work.
