Musings on the Rising Cost of Marathons

I must admit that I am a bit ambivalent about the rising cost of entering marathons especially the larger events such as Rock n Roll and big City events like Los Angeles and Chicago.

When I entered my first marathon, 12 years ago, the early-bird entry fee was $65.00. That was for the 2000 LA Marathon. This year the early-bird entry price was $145.00. That is an increase of 123% over the last 12 years.

I used a website to calculate the inflation rate from October of 1999 to October of 2011 and it gave me a cumulative rate of 377%. So that means it’s decimal equivalent would be 3.77%. I plugged in the $65 dollar amount of my entry in 2000, and the calculator said that in today’s money that would be $67.70.
See this URL: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Cumulative_Inflation_Calculator.aspx
From this we can see that the rising cost of marathons has almost nothing to do with inflation and everything to do with greed! OK, that may be a little harsh. We all know that total inflation is not reflective of smaller micro sections of the overall economy. Still, how did we get from $65 to $145 entry fee?

Without going into a dissertation exploring the intricacies of what may have led to this increase I will explore what seems, to me at least, to be a reasonable increase in this fee.

During most of this 12 years I received generally close to a 2.0% increase in wages each year that I worked. We won’t use what my actual wages were but let’s use $20.00 an hour as a starting wage. That would bring wages to $25.36 after 12 years. That is about a 25% increase over 12 years.

Let’s follow that with our $65 entry fee. That would give us a new entry fee price of $81.25. This seems to me to be a much more reasonable increase over that last 12 years. In fact I would say that I could accept $90 as a reasonable entry fee.

This brings me to the question, “What if anything can be done about these unreasonable price increases?” In reality not much. Not unless there is a big revolt and boycott of these larger events. Realistically I don’t see this happening as it seems there are plenty of people willing to pay this price to run in a marathon. So for myself I will try to stay clear of the larger events as much as possible and try to stick with smaller more reasonably priced events.

I find no problem with the the aspect of Laissez-faire doctrine that sets pricing at whatever the market will bear. However, I have reached my limit and plan to rebel at the present prices of large marathons. I will try and stay with the small ones except for maybe, Boston and a very few other selective races!
Do you have any thoughts on this? Feel free to express yourself!