No bones (or potatoes or beans) about it, Thanksgiving is the most popular running holiday of the year. In fact, it's nearly twice as popular as New Year's Day. (Resolution? What resolution?) We know this because of our partners at RunKeeper—they gave us three years of data that allowed us to dissect our holiday running habits. Check out the graph below—the numbers represent the percentage of active users (averaged over three years) who ran on that particular holiday.
Runs Recorded by Holiday Within the United States
Of course, holidays don't always fall on the same day of the year, some days (and months) are more popular among runners than others, and amazing/horrendous weather affects whether we go out at all.
So to get an accurate picture of how holidays affect our running lives, we had to establish a baseline—an "expected" value based on how many runners tend to run on a given day in a particular week of the year. Then we calculated an "actual" value that reflects the impact of a holiday falling on that particular day in the particular week. The "difference" between the two reflects the real impact of the holiday.
You'll see that in the graph below (and in the table posted here), Thanksgiving towers over the other holidays—on a Thursday in late November, we expect 12.1 percent of users to be out on the road. But because it's T-day, 19.7 percent of users are actually out there, wiping the gut slate clean for the caloric onslaught. One would assume.
Actual Runs vs. Expected Runs by Holiday Within the United States
So are these "actual" runners just logging miles to carve out space for seconds or thirds, or are they lining up for something a little more organized? It's likely the latter: Thanksgiving is the Hint: Its Thanksgiving. (You can find some of the best races here.) In fact, according to the latest numbers from RunningUSA, there were more than 786,000 finishers in 2014, up from 677,000 in 2011. Seems like a trend worth following.
Please note: while the data above reflects three-year averages of runs recorded by RunKeeper users, they don't reflect the impact of weather. For sure, a particularly nice–or nasty–day will skew the results.
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This data was provided through a collaboration with RunKeeper, a mobile fitness app that helps more than 37 million people around the world track their workouts, set fitness goals, and understand their progress over time.
Robert is the former Executive Producer for Runner’s World Online. He has run over 60 marathons with a personal best of 2:52:11.
