Rising Trend: Women Who Run Half-Marathons

Female runners are making half-marathons the sport's most popular distance race, reports Runner's World. It takes note of new stats from Running USA showing that a record 1.95 million people finished a 13.1-mile race last year, which marks a 6% increase from the previous year and an astonishing six-fold rise since 1990. Of last year's finishers, 61% were women, up from 53% in 2004. "Runners, it seems, are divided between people committed to running for maybe 40 minutes and people ready to hoof it for more than two hours," observes Rose Eveleth at Smithsonian. "If you fall somewhere in between, well, maybe it’s about time you try for 13.1 miles. Everyone else is." (More running stories.)