Is Dopey attracting slower runners? Dopey corral assignments are out

So, I’m bib number 21705 for Dopey.  Bibs are in race time order (based on times that you provide, you actually have to prove that you can run that fast unlike UK races) so the lower the number the further forward you are.  Because it’s Dopey and you’re doing 4 races you’re knocked back a bit further than those just doing the half or marathon (Goofy runners are put back a bit too) because it’s assumed (most rightly) that you’ll be slightly slower than your normal speed having already raced 22.4 miles over the past three days before you even get to the 26.2.

This is the Dopey corral assignment for 2016:

What’s interesting is that based on my best time I would have been much further back than I am based on last year’s assignment.  So either the corrals are getting bigger or Dopey runners are getting slower?  A look at the corral assignments of the past two years suggests the latter.  Well the runners are not actually getting slower, the challenge is just attracting less faster runners and more slower runners than it used to.  This isn’t a judgement nor am I saying it’s a bad thing, I just like to look at numbers and these are pretty interesting.  If you put the assignments for 2014, 2015 and 2016 side by side you get the following:

It don’t really mean that much until you summarise it (Which gets a little iffy around 6 hours because of the different breakdowns in times for 2016 compared to the two previous years but it still gives a good indication).  Under 4 hours now equates to 14% of runners compared to around 22% in the last two years.  Between 4 and 5 hours has the biggest drop though of of close to 13%, 5 to 6 hours has gone down almost 9% and above 6 hours has seen an increase of 29.5% (But it is taking all runners over 5:39 for 2016 which does account for part of the increase but not all of it).  It will be interesting to see if there’s any change in the gender split once the results are available.

Here are the 2014 and 2015 corral assignments if you want to see for yourself.  If you want to find out what corral you are in just search for your race waiver on the runDisney site which has your bib number on it.  You can then check it against the corral assignments.