US marathon race finishers

Americans have, since 2016, been completing fewer marathons and requesting more firearm background checks, producing an inverse correlation of -0.957 that sounds almost like a country choosing between two incompatible hobbies. Whether the same person has migrated from one category to the other is not something the data can tell us. It is probably better that it cannot.

US marathon finishers declined from around 550,000 in 2016 to closer to 350,000 by 2022, driven by the collapse and slow recovery of large-scale endurance events during the pandemic, plus a broader shift toward unstructured running after Strava-tracked virtual races became normalized. FBI firearm background checks, meanwhile, climbed from roughly 27 million in 2016 to over 38 million by 2020 before leveling off, driven by pandemic-era anxiety, social unrest, and election-cycle purchasing surges. The two trends have nothing in common operationally, but both bend sharply around the same 2020 inflection point — one canceled, the other accelerated. The pandemic, once again, is sitting in the shared variable chair.

Two wildly different ways of spending a Saturday — one outdoors in a crowd, one indoors at a counter — diverged when the country stopped moving. The correlation is really just the shape of a year that interrupted everything. The starting line is still there.