After the 2013 Berlin Marathon sold out in less than four hours, the organizers decided to alter the registration process for 2014. First there was a pre-registration phase followed by a random selection from the pool of registrants to receive a spot. Those who were selected had to register until November 11th, 2013. Any spots that were not confirmed till the 11th would be offered to pre-registered candidates according to the order in which they were randomly selected.

At is a list of all registered participants of the event. Being curious how many runners are on the list I had two options: 1. going through the entire list and counting or 2. download the entire list and let the computer do the math. I chose the latter. If you checked the website already you saw that they present only parts of the list at a time a reload it asynchronously while you scroll down. I wrote a little python script that queries the data and saves the JSON response to a csv file.

Checking the file we see there are only 16,707 participants so far. Sure, there are spots sold to agencies or given to sponsors, but how many will be handed out in the second wave? Until they announce the results let’s look the data:

The distribution of the year of birth shows a bimodal pattern. Most runners are born in the late 60s or early 70s and then there is a second spike a around 1980.
Looking at the top 10 participating nations it is no surprise that Germany stands out by far. Followed by Great Britain and Denmark. The only non-European country in the top 10 are the United States of America:

The code for generating the images:

Update: The official registration period is over and 23,286 runners have signed up.