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-trac... [2]: https://runningwithrock.com/about-me/
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.
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.
I also don't understand what the motives are behind how the age/gender buckets are calculated in the first place. I'm not sure if it's public or not.
Are they:
* Trying to calculate based on an nth percentile finishing time across each bucket?
* Trying to ensure roughly equal percentages of applicants from each bucket get accepted?
* Something else?
just to add this to the mix: there are faster and slower marathon courses, so you can improve your qualifying time by running in one of them. "downhill" seems to be a promising factor.
https://findmymarathon.com/fastestmarathoncourses-state.php?...
Boston Marathon tour operators: https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/plan/international... and https://www.baa.org/boston-marathon-international-tour-progr...
Abbott World Marathon Majors draw program: https://www.worldmarathonmajors.com/content-hub/majors-draw-...
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 12,324I would have expected the opposite.
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.
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