Several times a year, someone writes me: How many people compete in masters track? I hem and haw, and cite a few vague numbers — like 50,000 worldwide (Al Sheahen’s estimate from several years ago) or 8,500 in the United States (the latest figure I heard in Reno at the USATF annual meeting). But that’s not good enough. I want to know how many men 50-plus run hurdles. I want to know how many women 40-49 pole vault. I want to know it all! And not to satisfy mere curiosity. It’s to get a fix on who we are and where we need to grow — and what resources we can leverage for funding and sponsors. Of course, USATF Masters Track & Field has commissioned demographic studies up the yingyang. But these detail percentages of retirees and how many plan to buy cars in the coming year. They are bloodless studies. We need to flesh out our real numbers.

In August/September 1997, the newsletter On the Roads — the official publication of the Road Running Information Center of USATF — informed us that 9,277 members of USATF called themselves masters track athletes in 1993 (out of a total 62,419), while in 1996 masters tracksters were down to 7,667.
The data were provided by Philip Lieberman & Associates of Evansville, Indiana, said On the Roads. No sign of Philip since.
In 1998, USATF — in a brief cloudburst of sunshine — published a hard-cover membership directory listing everyone in the organization who submitted a bio, email address, top achievements and mail and phone info (even wife and children’s names). Bernard C. Harris Publishing Co. of White Plains, New York, printed the book, which ran about 670 pages. We haven’t seen such a directory since.
Much more specific info on masters LDR can be had from the Road Running Information Center, which archives yearly reports on who runs what at what age.
At least one website tells us about visitors to usatf.org — about 128,000 a month from inside the country.
But none of these do the job. We need a true census to create a useful database of masters track.
For many years, this service was provided by Jerry Wojcik and fellow rankers at National Masters News, who combed the paper’s results to produce an annual booklet that listed pretty much every athlete’s reported best mark in every event and age group. But it would take a ton of time to slice and dice those stats to produce aggregate numbers. mastersrankings.com might help, but its database isn’t the same as USATF’s.
So here’s my appeal to USATF: Put someone in the office to work crunching our numbers.
The sixth-century Chinese sage Lao-tzu wrote: “He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.”
Let’s wise up, OK?

Here’s the USATF masters breakdown from a dozen years ago