Why the Future of Endurance Belongs to Year-Round Brands

I just got back from The Running Conference 2025, and I’m arriving home feeling incredibly energized. There’s something uniquely powerful about being in a room with the people who actually build this industry. Race directors, marketers, operations leaders, sponsors, and community builders. These are the people turning ideas into the experiences that matter.

I had the opportunity to present on where the endurance industry is heading and what “winning” really looks like in 2025 and beyond. I wanted to share those ideas here, written directly for endurance organizers.

The thesis is simple: Endurance organizations are becoming year-round growth businesses.

The next competitive advantage comes from owning the customer relationship, applying predictive intelligence, evolving loyalty, and engineering revenue across an entire portfolio, not just a single race day.

Demand Is Strong and Competition Isn’t Going Anywhere

The good news is real. Participation is strong. Events around the world are selling out, and in the U.S., per-race participation grew roughly 8% in 2024. That momentum matters.

But so does the reality of the calendar. It’s saturated, and it’s staying that way.

Race churn remains low. Only about 3.9 to 4% of mid-size events failed to return year over year. Translation, most events are sticking around. The competitive landscape is persistent.

So the question isn’t whether people are running. They clearly are.

The real question is whether runners are choosing your brand.

When runners have options every weekend, brand becomes the difference between a one-time transaction and an ongoing relationship. Growth no longer comes from participation alone. It comes from relevance.

The Shift From Events to Multi-Channel Businesses

The most forward-thinking organizers are evolving the same way mature consumer categories always do. They’re building portfolios, not one-offs. They’re treating the endurance business itself as the product, not just the registration moment.

This shift shows up in how they design their offerings. Experiences span seasons, distances, and formats. Revenue expands beyond entries into premium tiers, passes, memberships, training, merchandise, and sponsor value that actually scales. Most importantly, participants are viewed through a lifecycle lens rather than a transactional one. They are no longer participants, but customers. 

A start line isn’t the end goal. It’s the beginning. From there, the opportunity is to guide people toward deeper engagement through progression, community, upgrades, or contribution, and to do it intentionally.

This isn’t a small change in mindset. It’s a structural change that creates durability.

Retention Is Low and That’s the Opportunity

One of the most important realities in endurance is also one of the most overlooked. Repeat participation is structurally low.

Only about 17% of participants return to the same event year over year. For half marathons, it can be closer to 12%.

This isn’t because runners lack loyalty. It’s because switching is easy, and most endurance organizations don’t actively invest in earning the return.

Growth depends on routing participants to the right next experience - a race or otherwise - and turning them into a customer not just a participant. That might be the next distance, the next race in a series, a premium tier, a membership, a training plan, a volunteer role, or a fundraising opportunity. The specific path matters less than the intention behind it.

Lifetime value grows when you give people reasons to stay. Community forms when you help people progress.

Revenue Matters But the Strategy Has to Change

Full start lines are important. They always will be. But they can’t be the only success metric.

Prices rose again across distances in 2024. Organizers feel pressure on costs, and participants feel pressure everywhere else in their lives. That reality demands smarter revenue strategy, not louder pricing.

The strongest operators are optimizing for revenue per customer, improving attachment rates, and focusing on portfolio lift over time instead of one-event spikes. They aren’t extracting value. They’re designing better value.

When the experience and engagement improves, revenue follows.

Loyalty Is Evolving and Endurance Has to Evolve With It

Other industries are already living in the future that endurance is moving toward. Consumers belong to more loyalty programs than ever, and engagement is declining for most of them.

What this means is that transactional loyalty doesn’t work anymore.

The loyalty strategies that win attention and trust are built around personalization, progress, identity, and access. In endurance, loyalty can’t just mean “run X races, get swag.” It has to help people stay on a journey and feel like they are part of a community.

The real unlock is this. Loyalty grows when you can predict what someone needs next and deliver it at the right moment. Not as a reward after the fact, but as guidance forward.

Owned Data Is the Growth Engine

As tracking declines, cookies disappear, and AI reshapes discovery, first-party data is becoming the only durable fuel for growth. Personalization depends on it, and acquisition becomes more expensive without it.

In endurance, checkout is a moment of peak intent. That’s where data ownership matters most.

Complete ownership of your brand delivery and funnel means owning attribution, pricing paths, post-registration engagement, loyalty routing, and long-term data compounding. In a crowded calendar, your brand and your systems are strategic assets, not just marketing tools.

Analytics Is Moving From Hindsight to Foresight

Reporting tells you what happened. Predictive intelligence tells you what will happen and what to do next.

This is the next frontier in event technology. Not better post-event reports, but better decisions before the event, smarter adjustments during it, and more intentional routing afterward.

With predictive capabilities, organizers can forecast demand, identify churn risk, understand which cohorts need which offers, size inventory and staffing earlier, and even anticipate fundraising outcomes. When intent and capacity are understood ahead of time, growth becomes more efficient and teams stay focused.

AI Is Table Stakes but Only a Multiplier

AI is rapidly becoming standard across event tech, but AI alone isn’t a strategy. It amplifies whatever system it’s plugged into.

When AI sits on top of clean, connected, organizer-owned first-party data, especially when paired with predictive intelligence, it becomes a true multiplier. Acquisition improves. Conversion increases. Retention strengthens. Operations become more efficient.

Without that foundation, AI doesn’t create clarity. It accelerates fragmentation.

What This Means for Organizers in 2026 and Beyond

Taken together, these shifts point to a clear direction. Endurance organizers who win will operate like modern, multi-channel businesses. They’ll focus on retention and loyalty, not just entries. They’ll evolve pricing beyond the calendar, own their brand and funnel, move from insights to prediction, and use AI to accelerate systems they control.

These aren’t separate trends. They compound.

The New World of Endurance

The old world was registration-first. Registration was the product. Growth was measured event by event. Tools were stitched together. Data was fragmented and backward-looking.

The new model is organizer-first. Events are products inside a larger ecosystem. Success is driven by portfolio revenue, customer lifetime value, and compounding growth inside an owned environment. Registration, commerce, CRM, marketing automation, loyalty, training, and community live inside one intelligent system, and the brand becomes a destination.

Start lines matter, but they are not the business.

The organizers who win from here are the ones who make every race the beginning of a longer relationship, not the end of a transaction.

That’s the future I’m optimistic about, and the direction we’re building toward.

If you want to talk about what this shift means for your organization, I’m always open to a conversation. Reach out to haku and let’s connect.

There’s a lot of opportunity ahead, and we’re just getting started.