Soaring High Marathon Registration Fees - Business in Disguise

In the past years, the regular registration fee for a decent organized running event is from 100 pesos to 500 pesos (most prominent of course is the Milo Marathon), and even cheaper in the more years backwards. Like in the year 2010 (last year), though some big organized events started to increase their registration fees in the guise of charitable platform, still the fees are reasonable ranging from 400 pesos to 800 pesos.

Let say last year, the rumored most expensive running event was the Adidas King of the Road with a registration fee of 800 pesos, other races such as the Runrio Trilogy only have an average of 500 pesos to 700 pesos registration fees. We should exclude the Corregidor International Half Marathon which have registration of 2, 500 to 3,000 pesos because the round trip ferry cruise is already included in the said fee.

But this year 2011, started by the Condura Skyway Marathon with as high of 1,250 registration fee for 42K event, then followed by Globe Run for Home with a registration fee of 1, 050 pesos for 21K event...

I think race organizers are becoming so unreasonable and they are taking advantage of the running boom in the country. Like Globe, the fees are so high but no medals or other freebies to compensate such high fees! Too bad, this trend will not make the sport grow but eventually only the elites and the rich can join such races, thus will make the end of the running boom again.

I hope there would still be good running events that can offer low registration fees such as Milo Marathon, Quezon City International Marathon, Yakult 10-miler and I also hope that Runrio will not hit the barrier of 1,000 registration fee sooner or later.

See you on the road guys and choose your events wisely!

Photo courtesy from the Condura Skyway Marathon 2011