How rare is…
How rare is it, really?
Sourced answers to the questions people ask about hard physical feats: how many people have done it, what share of the world that is, and how the figure was worked out.
- RunningHow rare is it to run a marathon?About 1.1 to 1.3 million marathon finishes a year, and what a sub-3 does to the odds.
- RunningHow many people have run an ultramarathon?Around 330,000 people finished an ultra in a year. Most of them ran less than 80 km.
- TriathlonWhat percentage of people have done an Ironman?Roughly 50,000 to 60,000 full-distance finishers a year worldwide.
- ClimbingHow many people have climbed Everest?More than 12,000 summits since 1953, and more than 30,000 people who climbed its height at home.
- StrengthHow many people can do 100 pull-ups?Why nobody has a clean figure, and what the records say about the ceiling.
How GritCore works out rarity
Nobody keeps a register of everyone who has run 100 km. Every figure on these pages, and every figure in the app, is an estimate built from race results, federation data and published participation numbers, and it is labelled as an estimate. Where a figure is a share of the world, we divide by the world population (about 8.1 billion) and say so.
Inside the app, each official challenge shows its current estimate as "about 1 in N people". When you verify it, that number becomes yours. See how the estimator works.
So how rare are you, actually?
GritCore is free on iPhone and Android.