Here’s an age/gender breakdown of pre-entries from the City Race earlier this month:
It shows a good representation of “Open” class entrants – aged between 21 and 35, with the proportion of males-to-females reasonably balanced. There is the familiar participation dip, followed by the “baby boomer” surge – here, women are much more poorly represented.
This second graph looks at the ages of the non-affiliated entrants – those who didn’t list a club when entering. These people are most likely to be non-orienteering runners and other people new to the sport.
Again, participation is encouraging at the “Open” end, but there were almost no non-orienteering entrants to the race aged over 40.
Note that this data is on entrants rather than the people who took part on the race – anecdotally, many of the no-shows on the day were non-orienteering runners.