Atlantic named storms per year

A year in which the Atlantic had a record number of named storms and America had a record-low number of marathon finishers is a year in which the weather wrote the schedule. The runners weren't running. The storms, apparently, were.

2020 set a record for Atlantic named storms with 30, forcing NOAA to exhaust the naming list and dip into the Greek alphabet, while US marathon finisher counts collapsed because virtually every major race was cancelled under covid restrictions. Two trends that happened to bend sharply in opposite directions in the same year for entirely unrelated reasons. The common variable was the calendar.

So the correlation is a year when nature produced more and humans produced less. The storms ran the year. The runners did not.