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Will I run Boston 2026?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Finnucane 1y agoNo. The answer is no.
- davidgomes 1y agoAs someone with a 5:38 delta, I'm very anxiously waiting for BAA to announce the official cutoff. In the meantime, if you're at all curious about the kinds of levels to which people go with trying to predict the cutoff check out this blog[1]. This is from Brian Rock [2], who every year collects data about a lot of marathons all over the world and then tries to guess the official cutoff for the Boston marathon. Very cool stuff! [1]: https://runningwithrock.com/boston-marathon-cutoff-time-tracker/ https://runningwithrock.com/boston-marathon-cutoff-time-trac... [2]: https://runningwithrock.com/about-me/ https://runningwithrock.com/about-me/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- steadyelk 1y agoBrian Rock's tracker is great. It's a ton of work to collect and maintain that estimate throughout the year, so we hope he keeps it up!
- rconti 1y agoContext: There's a limit on how many people can run the Boston Marathon. To qualify to "run Boston", you have to run another marathon in a qualifying time[1], prior to applying. For example, the qualifying time for a male 40-44 is 3h05m. For a female of the same age, 3h35. Non-binary, 3h35. You submit your application and qualifying race and time, and then some time _later_, based on the number applications received that are within the cutoff (and it's always more than they can accept), they adjust the cutoff time downwards even further. That additional cutoff delta is the what's being calculated on the slider here. So if your published cutoff is 3h05, and the slider predicts a 6min delta, you need to have run 2h59, not 3h05. 1. https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify
- abeppu 1y agoMethodologically, why would you have one cutoff vs a different cutoff per group (as there are different qualifying times per group)? I am not a marathoner, but I'd imagine that a 6 min decrease from the stated qualifying time cuts out a larger proportion of younger runners (i.e. decreasing the threshold from 2h55 to 2h49 for men 18-34 seems like a much sharper cut than decreasing 4h20 to 4h14 for women 60-64). I would have thought you'd want to pick the delta by looking at the distribution within each gender x age pool.
- steadyelk 1y agoIt could be intentional. For a lot of folks, running the Boston Marathon is a dream, so maybe the BAA wants to make that dream just slightly more attainable the older you get.
- poutrathor 1y agoAs always it's probably because maths still is too hard for most people and keeping the rule simple won over fairness.
- votepaunchy 1y ago
- nradov 1y agoIf you're not fast enough to qualify then you can also run Boston 2026 by donating or raising about $10K for charity. https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/charity-program https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/charity-program
- kens 1y agoI was wondering if they would let a total slug run the marathon for money. It turns out that they expect you to run it in under 6 hours (which is a slow "recreational" pace). You're also expected to raise an average of $15,000, but it may be more depending on the charity. More details here: https://www.charityteams.com/boston-faqs https://www.charityteams.com/boston-faqs
- canucker2016 1y agoAccording to https://sportstoursinternational.co.uk/blog/how-to-get-entry-into-boston-marathon/ https://sportstoursinternational.co.uk/blog/how-to-get-entry..., you can also gain entry via a tour operator for non-USA entrants or if you've already run several of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, there's a draw program. Boston Marathon tour operators: https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/plan/international-tour-program https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/plan/international... and https://www.baa.org/boston-marathon-international-tour-program-application-request https://www.baa.org/boston-marathon-international-tour-progr... Abbott World Marathon Majors draw program: https://www.worldmarathonmajors.com/content-hub/majors-draw-dates-released-for-2025 https://www.worldmarathonmajors.com/content-hub/majors-draw-...
- mauvehaus 1y agoI have a friend who has run it for charity multiple times. They're a six-ish-plus hour marathoner. My partner has run them in the last 10 miles a couple of times pre-bombing. Her take is that it's pretty miserable if you're that slow because they start breaking down the course, the aid stations get light on supplies, and the porta-potties get unspeakable. So yeah, you can, but it would be a better experience if you're not quite so far behind a BQ time. As for me, I don't run. Props to anyone who can run a BQ and enjoy it.
- ck2 1y agoit's nice to see so many people running marathons now y'all better safety-qualify at least -6 minutes tho, -7 if you can YEAR FIELD SIZE CUT-OFF NOT ACCEPTED 2024 30,000 5:29 11,039 2025 30,000 6:51 12,324
- moralestapia 1y agoWhy does the cutoff get smaller with increasing qualified runners? I would have expected the opposite.
- maxerickson 1y agoThe slider adjusts the number allowed to run (apparently the pool of time qualified candidates can be assumed to be larger than the max value of the slider).
- rconti 1y agoIt's not about _qualified_ runners, it's about the size of the total field accepted. Boston allows "roughly" 25k participants, but that number fluctuates somewhat every year. If they allow 30k, the cutoff delta goes down. If they allowed an unlimited field, the cutoff delta would be 0, and you'd only have to worry about your published qualifying time.
- Guillaume86 1y agoIt's a cutoff delta, you have to subtract it from the "preliminary" qualifying time.
- canucker2016 1y agoAccording to Boston Marathon 2025 statistics, about 9% of entrants don't start the race. Number of male and female entrants in the 18-39 age group are almost even, but the proportion of female entrants drops in the older age groups. This pattern appears in 2024 and 2023 as well. see https://registration.baa.org/2025/cf/Public/iframe_Statistics.htm https://registration.baa.org/2025/cf/Public/iframe_Statistic...
- NoahZuniga 1y agoWhy are they using a linear model for cutoff time vs qualified runners?
- Brendinooo 1y agoYour site looks interesting but your terms of service seem really onerous. That stopped me from finishing the signup process. My running data is deeply personal; it's tied to my health metrics and contains years of location patterns around my daily life. So when I see stuff like "irrevocable, sublicensable" rights to all of my running data...that's a lot to give up for a company and product I know very little about. Capping your liability at $50 total for any harm and doing as much as you can to try and get me to lose access to legal protections such as class action and a jury trial is all a bit much.
- neilv 1y agoOTOH, it's nice when companies that will screw you over, signal that, by having lawyers appear to carefully set up the cover for them to do so.
- joecasson 1y agoSame. Paused the signup process to take a look at how they were going to use my data, and then decided against it once I understood.
- steadyelk 1y agoFirstly, thanks for reading the ToS and for raising your concern. Not that it means much, but our goal is not to screw over our users. This is the first time someone has raised an issue with the ToS. We understand how personal user fitness data is, which is why we’ve tried our best to leave data in the control of the users. A first step was to make sure that users actually see the ToS, and we require all users to scroll through them and accept before they link any data with us. But honestly, we know the ToS is daunting for many users, which is why we give clear switches for users to revoke our access to using their data (both for model training and for using their anonymized stats in aggregated statistics); we respect the user’s decision to revoke our access in these ways, even though our ToS doesn’t require us to. Your fitness data gets immediately deleted when you delete your account; we also allow specific sources (e.g., Garmin) to get deleted without deleting your entire account. But we agree with you–the ToS are too aggressive. For context, we had them drafted by a well-respected firm in the Bay Area. As a startup, we didn’t have the budget to carefully, line-by-line, draft terms that perfectly fit our site. Instead, we gave the firm some ToS from large companies like Strava and Garmin, and asked them if they can draft something similar. We wanted to ensure that we were legally allowed to glean insights from the fitness data of our users, and when we read the terms, it looked like it provided that, which is why we approved it. We aren’t lawyers, so we didn’t understand the ramifications of the legalese, and we’ll make sure to emphasize that we respect the user’s decision to remove our access when we re-draft them. We’ll shop around again for other firms that specialize in this area.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fidrelity 1y agoNice idea but I think the predictions are way off. I ran a 3:17 in spring and targeting a 3:10 marathon in a couple of weeks. As unlikely as it sounds Strava predicts 3:13 (think they base it on my last marathon), Garmin is similar. Runalyze is about as off as you are. Maybe you're putting too much emphasis on weekly volume. M35 and I can run this with 50k weekly and 75k peak volume. Relatively confident I'd be able to sub 3 with weekly volume of 80k/100k peak.
- RandallBrown 1y agoIs this usage of "cutoff" normal? I run a lot of races and cutoff time has always meant the amount of time you have to finish the race.
- nextworddev 1y agoNerds will do everything but put in more mileage to get fast /s