2024 in stats
2024 is dead, long live 2025!
Obviously not true yet, I’ve got a big bird to cook yet, and we, I, had a great 2024 so I’m keen to look back on it while it’s semi-fresh in the memory. If you’ve stuck out these series of blog posts and made it to the last one, well done, and sorry, in equal measure.
I thought I’d look at some stats to help recap the year. Obviously, this is more anticipated than the Strava Year in Sport or Spotify Unwrapped. These stats matter!!! This is also done by me so take the stats are hopefully accurate but I apologise for any inaccuracies – I haven’t meant to miss anyone out if I have!!
In 2024 Big Bear Events held 19 events (11x 6 hour challenges, 4x evening 10ks, 2x TrailFest and 2x Trails, Tales and Ales) with 29 sets of results (TrailFest has multiple distances, so technically separate events and we have the canicross events at the evening 10ks). Over those 19 events we had 2416 individual entries. As has become a bit of a Big Bear custom Brian T was our most frequent entrant with 11 events in 2024 (I believe it’s 55 since we started!!!). Honourable mentions go to Nick C, Stella D, Sarah T and Steph A for entering 9 of our events with Sarah and Steph adding in multiple volunteering shifts too. 44 people entered 5 or more events in 2024. 914 only entered once. 332 entered more than once. Thank you to all 1247 of the individuals who entered a 2024 event.
We had more female than male entries in 2024 by a whopping 2% margin!! 49% (1228) where female, 51% (1184) male and 4 non-binary entries. Our average age of entrant was 44 years and 9 months, with the male average 3 months older than that average and females 3 months younger.
The average entry price paid was £26.11 and a total of 235 discount codes were used making up 9.7% of all entries. For every event in 2024 there was a “pre-launch” discount code given out to all on the Very Important Bear (VIB) mailing list. During the year this discount increased to 20% off the early pricing – a bit of a bargain when paired with the very generous deferral/transfer system…nudge, nudge, wink, wink!
81 different people volunteered at our events this year (that’s a minimum number as I don’t have complete records for many reasons!). Without them NONE of it happens. If you haven’t volunteered, consider it. It’s the lifeblood of all events in the UK. My parents, Ann and Dave, were at all of our events. Thank you as always. Mary was also at the vast majority, missing only 4 events all year and being a key lieutenant and chief course clearer! 16 other people helped more than once during the year. Of course every single person who has volunteered for the day or helped get some boxes out the van or clear the table of all the last bits of cake at the end (heroic!!) is hugely appreciated. Thank you all.
We’ve had 13,110 photos uploaded and probably 3 or 4 times as many taken, mainly by Nick, with Kaz helping with a few events too. That’s 32.7GB of images. At TrailFest Salcey Forest Richard from Epic Action took 357 video clips – that’s 127.7GB! It’s been brilliant to capture all the hard work, achievements and joy from people out on the trails.
So that’s a lot of stats. Hopefully the majority of those will increase in 2025 (you’re all getting older anyway!!!), with more entrants, more returning entrants and lots of volunteers and photos – I’m not sure Brian can run in more of the events though! Of course, the stats tell a fraction of the story. They don’t tell the accomplishment of those returning from injury to run when they didn’t think they’d be able to again. Or those who came to see if they could do a bit over 10k but did their first marathon (happened multiple times!). Those who did their first ultras and furthest ever distances. Or of Dean returning to our events triumphantly in his chair and leaving us all in admiration. But they do tell a bit of the story and have hopefully given you something interesting for 5 minutes!
As I alluded to at the start, 2024 is coming to an end but I think 2025 is going to be an even better year at Big Bear Events – hopefully you’ll be there with us to add to the statistics in my 2025 round up!!