After last weekend’s lottery the 2020 WSER field is mostly set. To date 339 of the available 369 spots are filled. The remaining 30 spots will go to elite runners as laid out here. The post that follows provides some surface level visualizations which describe the field as currently set. These will change slightly as the remaining runners are added to the field.
Location… location…location. Where do most of the entrants call home? Of the 339 entrants, 281 of them call the United States home and the remaining 58 hail from abroad. Forty of the fifty states are represented by at least one runner with the exception of: North Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The omission of Wisconsin, Vermont, and New Hampshire gave me pause. These three states were all represented well in the lottery; lady luck was just not on their side. As expected, California dominates the field of entrants. Almost 1 in 3 runners are from California (111 total to date). The map below shows how much each state will be represented in the 2020 WSER.
Age, Nationality, and Gender. The following two plots show the distribution of Age across International vs National and Gender. The field of men skews a little older than the field of women. The field of Americans skews older than the field of those from abroad. The average age of all runners is 44.7 years. This will probably fall slightly when more elite runners are selected through the Golden Ticket races.
How did these runners come to enter the field? Aside from the lottery (where most entrants were selected) runners were also selected by race sponsors, raffles, and other means. In addition, the top 10 finishers from last year’s WSER on both the Mens and Womens side were invited back. Of these 20 possible slots, 15 obliged. The chart visualizes the breakdown in race entrance category.
The last visualizations for this post gives the average number of WSER Finishes by Entrance Type. The average amount of WSER Finishes for the field to date is 0.6 (all this means is that most entrants have never finished a WSER) finishes with 21% of the field having at least one finish.
