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Will I run Boston 2026?

39 points by steadyelk

by Brendinooo

3 subcomments

Your 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.

by rconti

3 subcomments

Context:
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

by davidgomes

2 subcomments

As 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-trac... [2]: https://runningwithrock.com/about-me/

by fidrelity

0 subcomment

Nice 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.

by canucker2016

0 subcomment

According 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_Statistic...

by nradov

3 subcomments

If 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

0 subcomment

by RandallBrown

0 subcomment

Is 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.

by NoahZuniga

0 subcomment

by Finnucane

2 subcomments

0 subcomment

by moralestapia

3 subcomments

Why does the cutoff get smaller with increasing qualified runners?
I would have expected the opposite.

by ck2

0 subcomment

it'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

by nextworddev

0 subcomment