Will I Run Boston 2026?

Betteridge's law of Boston qualifying times.

We have a friend who has qualified three times but has never run it due to the cutoff. Maybe the BAA should consider a separate bucket for these runners.

Brian 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!

Methodologically, 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.

>To qualify to "run Boston", you have to run another marathon in a qualifying time

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?...

You can also run for a charity by raising sufficient money for a cause that sponsors you.

I 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

I 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.

According to 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... and https://www.baa.org/boston-marathon-international-tour-progr...

Abbott World Marathon Majors draw program: https://www.worldmarathonmajors.com/content-hub/majors-draw-...

It'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.

It's a cutoff delta, you have to subtract it from the "preliminary" qualifying time.

The 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).

Firstly, 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.

Same. 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.

OTOH, 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.