Context for those not following running news, The Boston Marathon lowered qualifying times for most prospective runners for 2026 race [0]. Because the Boston Marathon has limited capacity, you can only run if you either:
1) raise $5k+ for a charity (limited spots)
2) run a full marathon below* a qualifying time
The reason it's below* is because even if you run under a qualifying time, there may be enough people even faster than you that fill up the available spots.
This results in some years where you needed to be many minutes faster than the posted qualifying time to guarantee a spot, and every few years, the BAA (group in charge of Boston Marathon) drops the qualifying times.
Note, even though the qualifying times have been dropping, they have been even faster in the past (see the 1980s)[1]
As someone that's done the Boston Marathon a few times, I am glad they are trying to find a good balance of reasonable qualifying times for the most participation without dramatically expanding the field. I'm also always surprised with how popular and well known this marathon is given the NYC marathon (and others) are harder to get into, only about 2 of the miles are actually in Boston [2], and the start/finish are so far away making participating a logistic headache. But that could be what gives it the charm and why I'm now thinking about doing 2026
I can't answer this for everyone, but as someone who has run 5 marathons and is running my 6th in 5 weeks (Frankfurt).
Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from, but what I do know is that QUALIFYING for Boston as a male (33) is a BHAG that's fun to chase after.
Boston is the 6th of the 6 Abbot Marathon that are considered the "big" 6.
New York, London, Chicago, Boston, Berlin and Tokyo. All the others you either win the lottery our you've 4 of the other ones. Nothing you can really do in 6 conseq years.
It's not even the fastest course, but it's the course for those who are "serious" about running as a hobby. Running a marathon isn't enough. Running Boston separates you from the try-hard crowd, with a lack of a better word.
> Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from
It's literally because BQ is a tough target time. Even if you don't run Boston it's a mark you're in the top X% (X is a bit hard to calculate). So it's a status symbol. Just like 'Ivy League' or "D1 sport".
Similarly in the UK, it's the London qualifying time known as Good For Age or the more challenging 'Championship Place'.
And it's self-fulfilling. You get the time so you chose to run because you have it which keeps the time hard for others.
The race itself is, I'm told, a pain-in-the-ass because of the logistics but also the profile - despite being net-downhill it's got a nasty hill at mile 20. Plus with the race route being pretty much "26 miles straight, then hook a right", if there's a headwind, there's a headwind for 26 miles. If there's driving rain, it's in your face for 26 miles (see 2018's race).
(As an aside, there's a few tricks for the Abbot Majors to get places [aside from just buying one of the expensive guaranteed tour company places or being an elite runner])
Not a marathon runner but live in Boston and I have been told the route is fairly high difficulty due to hills in particularly challenging stretches. Not sure how true this is but one of my coworkers ran it competitively last year and he got wrecked by the elevation changes.
A while back I thought maybe, just maybe, if everything went in my favor, I could qualify at 3:10. Then they lowered it to 3:05, and that might as well be the far side of the moon.
According to TFA it's now 2:55. There is no way in the universe I would ever run a sub-3 marathon. (I'm no longer in that age bracket, but the time for my bracket is similarly impossible.)
That's fine with me. It's awesome that so many people are running marathons that the most prestigious one is utterly full. It's a really absurd hobby, and the best thing about race day is all of those people going "Wow, we're about to do something incredibly stupid together."
There are plenty of other fun marathons to do. This year mine is gonna be the Dramathon -- which will end with bottles of scotch.
The carbon-plate shoes (starting with the Nike Vaporfly, then AlphaFly) have resulted in faster race times. The Boston Athletic Association is reacting accordingly.
My favorite part: "Despite all the evidence and research I have laid out above, it should be noted that only certain people seem to get benefits from the foams, carbon fiber plates and other technologies associated with these shoes. Research has come out just recently that the actual benefit derived from each subject varies greatly based on individual factors (Herbert-Losier et al., 2020). These performance changes can be as great as 10% (or more) in some people and for others may actually be detrimental. So as much as we talk about the percentages gleaned from the research suggesting how much certain elements contribute to changes in economy, remember that each person is unique in that effect."
> Our mission is to understand fitness so you can achieve your athletic dreams. Recently, athletes have been gathering lot of data, but nobody has been able to fully leverage these sources to help people become more fit.
Strava has an entire data scientist dep devoted to analysing the captured data.
They also publish a lot of their thinking around Relative Effort (RE) and other performance metrics.
I can't say to much because we are trying to keep our methods stealth, but I think it's better to be last than first in this race. Strava isn't the only company in this field: Garmin, Kaizen, and AI Endurance are just a few. For a while, our race predictions were a lot more accurate than the biggest of these (Garmin, which has a lot more data than Strava), which is probably telling of the difficulty. There isn't an obvious company you go to to tell you about your fitness, but if there was we would have never started our mission.
I wish you luck, because I think this space is about to get a lot more crowded.
That said, I suspect that Strava and Apple (and likely even Google) have more data than Garmin. Maybe quality of data is lower (garmin is higher % athletes?).
There are a lot of companies planning or starting to tell you about fitness. Oura and Whoop and now Fitbit are happy to give you basic training readiness info. Google will help you plan runs, Apple will give you “training load”.
I’m not sure what your target market is, but don’t forget to look broadly. Garmin is favored for training athletes but fitbits and Apple Watches are favored for casual workouts. If you’re trying to train models on metabolic or other physiological training ability, don’t forget to look at non-athletes or early-athletes.
I have a friend who is something like a 6-hour marathoner and has run Boston a couple times for charity. The experience is pretty subpar to hear her tell it. The college students are pretty intoxicated by that point, the organizers are starting to clean up the course and move the runners to the sidewalks, and the course is full of trash where they haven't cleaned up yet.
The porta-potties don't have a lot to recommend them either once 30-something-thousand people have come through ahead of you too.
I used to live on beacon st in Brookline. Every year the marathon was a nightmare. Drunk people on my stoop. Trash everywhere. It was wicked cool to see the old timers and charity runners running even after it got dark. Would always give them a big cheer as they came by.
Ran Boston and sub3’ed multiple times and have to say it was worth it. But the training process is all consuming especially if you aren’t naturally talented, like running 75 miles per week, so keep things in perspective
This is the kind of information that would be better presented in a simple table.
For every age group up to 60 the window between 0% and 100% chance is under 5min.
Readit News
1) raise $5k+ for a charity (limited spots)
2) run a full marathon below* a qualifying time
The reason it's below* is because even if you run under a qualifying time, there may be enough people even faster than you that fill up the available spots.
This results in some years where you needed to be many minutes faster than the posted qualifying time to guarantee a spot, and every few years, the BAA (group in charge of Boston Marathon) drops the qualifying times.
Note, even though the qualifying times have been dropping, they have been even faster in the past (see the 1980s)[1]
As someone that's done the Boston Marathon a few times, I am glad they are trying to find a good balance of reasonable qualifying times for the most participation without dramatically expanding the field. I'm also always surprised with how popular and well known this marathon is given the NYC marathon (and others) are harder to get into, only about 2 of the miles are actually in Boston [2], and the start/finish are so far away making participating a logistic headache. But that could be what gives it the charm and why I'm now thinking about doing 2026
[0] https://apnews.com/article/boston-marathon-qualifying-times-...
[1]https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify/history-qu...
[2]https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-marathon-route-ma....
Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from, but what I do know is that QUALIFYING for Boston as a male (33) is a BHAG that's fun to chase after.
Boston is the 6th of the 6 Abbot Marathon that are considered the "big" 6. New York, London, Chicago, Boston, Berlin and Tokyo. All the others you either win the lottery our you've 4 of the other ones. Nothing you can really do in 6 conseq years.
It's not even the fastest course, but it's the course for those who are "serious" about running as a hobby. Running a marathon isn't enough. Running Boston separates you from the try-hard crowd, with a lack of a better word.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/bhag.html
It's literally because BQ is a tough target time. Even if you don't run Boston it's a mark you're in the top X% (X is a bit hard to calculate). So it's a status symbol. Just like 'Ivy League' or "D1 sport".
Similarly in the UK, it's the London qualifying time known as Good For Age or the more challenging 'Championship Place'.
And it's self-fulfilling. You get the time so you chose to run because you have it which keeps the time hard for others.
The race itself is, I'm told, a pain-in-the-ass because of the logistics but also the profile - despite being net-downhill it's got a nasty hill at mile 20. Plus with the race route being pretty much "26 miles straight, then hook a right", if there's a headwind, there's a headwind for 26 miles. If there's driving rain, it's in your face for 26 miles (see 2018's race).
(As an aside, there's a few tricks for the Abbot Majors to get places [aside from just buying one of the expensive guaranteed tour company places or being an elite runner])
Deleted Comment
A while back I thought maybe, just maybe, if everything went in my favor, I could qualify at 3:10. Then they lowered it to 3:05, and that might as well be the far side of the moon.
According to TFA it's now 2:55. There is no way in the universe I would ever run a sub-3 marathon. (I'm no longer in that age bracket, but the time for my bracket is similarly impossible.)
That's fine with me. It's awesome that so many people are running marathons that the most prestigious one is utterly full. It's a really absurd hobby, and the best thing about race day is all of those people going "Wow, we're about to do something incredibly stupid together."
There are plenty of other fun marathons to do. This year mine is gonna be the Dramathon -- which will end with bottles of scotch.
My favorite part: "Despite all the evidence and research I have laid out above, it should be noted that only certain people seem to get benefits from the foams, carbon fiber plates and other technologies associated with these shoes. Research has come out just recently that the actual benefit derived from each subject varies greatly based on individual factors (Herbert-Losier et al., 2020). These performance changes can be as great as 10% (or more) in some people and for others may actually be detrimental. So as much as we talk about the percentages gleaned from the research suggesting how much certain elements contribute to changes in economy, remember that each person is unique in that effect."
Strava has an entire data scientist dep devoted to analysing the captured data. They also publish a lot of their thinking around Relative Effort (RE) and other performance metrics.
Where do you differ?
That said, I suspect that Strava and Apple (and likely even Google) have more data than Garmin. Maybe quality of data is lower (garmin is higher % athletes?).
There are a lot of companies planning or starting to tell you about fitness. Oura and Whoop and now Fitbit are happy to give you basic training readiness info. Google will help you plan runs, Apple will give you “training load”.
I’m not sure what your target market is, but don’t forget to look broadly. Garmin is favored for training athletes but fitbits and Apple Watches are favored for casual workouts. If you’re trying to train models on metabolic or other physiological training ability, don’t forget to look at non-athletes or early-athletes.
The porta-potties don't have a lot to recommend them either once 30-something-thousand people have come through ahead of you too.
Is this actually accurate or did I find a bug?
If not, such a weird 5 minute window
Deleted Comment
Though perhaps I'll stick to attempting a 25min 5k first. Catch Boston some other year weep