History of Boston Qualifying Times

Yesterday, the Boston Athletic Association announced the cut off for qualifiers to be accepted into the 2020 Boston Marathon. You needed to be 1:39 or more under your gender and age-based qualifying time to be accepted. At first glance it sounds like it's so much better than last year's 4:52 cutoff...except that they tightened the standards by 5 minutes for 2020. So in reality, it's equivalent to 6:39 under 2019 standards.

That's really fast.

I didn't have a qualifier for 2020, so it didn't make a difference to me what the cut off was for 2020. I'm putting my hope into getting into the 2021 race, or whenever I may have the opportunity to apply again.

It got me thinking about how difficult it has become to get into the race in the last decade. 

Let's take a look:

In 2011, the B.A.A. announced tightened standards beginning with the 2013 race, and a rolling registration process beginning in 2012 (no longer first come, first served until sell out). Back in 2011 and 2012, you could still run a 4:00 marathon as a 45-49 year old woman (my current age group), plus be 59 seconds over that mark and qualify and be able to register. Starting in 2013, that time tightened to 3:55:00, then tightened again in 2020 to 3:50:00. The cut off time has been all over the map.

So how hard has it gotten for qualifiers to get accepted into the race? I'll use the times of a 45-49 year old woman as an example. The following are the times that these woman had to run in order to get accepted:

2011  4:00:59  9:11 pace
2012  3:58:46  9:06 pace
2013  3:55:00  8:58 pace
2014  3:53:22  8:54 pace
2015  3:53:58  8:55 pace
2016  3:52:32  8:52 pace
2017  3:52:51  8:53 pace
2018  3:51:37  8:50 pace
2019  3:50:08  8:47 pace
2020  3:48:21  8:42 pace

In just one decade, qualifiers have had to get 29 seconds per mile faster in order to run the Boston Marathon. A qualifier is JUST a qualifier. It merely means you've met a pretty tough standard and that you get the opportunity to register for the race. But it's anyone's guess if it's good enough to actually get acceptance. That isn't known until that greatly anticipated announcement is made.

A whole lot of people got their dreams crushed yesterday. I actually thought that with them tightening the standards at the last moment, AFTER the 2020 qualification window had opened, not giving anyone any warning that they would now need to run 5 minutes faster to qualify, that there quite possibly would not even be a cut off this year. And if there was, that it would be less than a minute. I was way off!

When Greg and I qualified by 4:43 and 5:07, respectively, for 2019, neither of us thought we had anything to worry about, that those buffers would be more than enough. Greg ended up missing it by 9 seconds, and I barely made it in by a mere 15 seconds (so thankful that Greg ended up running on the Dell team). It's just so hard to know where to aim! It also makes me wonder if Boston is going to have to make a decision in the coming years to go back to the incredibly difficult 1980's-like standards to seriously cull the field of qualifiers so that every qualifier actually gets into the race. I'd hate for this to happen, but I also hate for qualifiers to be shut out after that hard work.

At the end of the day, I continue to be just so grateful that I can call myself a Boston Marathon finisher. It might be a one-time occurrence if this fast trend continues, so I'll continue to appreciate my experience while still continuing to strive for improvement in my running. It certainly gives me something to aim towards, a standard that I hope I'm able to continue to hit in the coming years, but satisfaction in knowing that on one glorious day in Baton Rouge in January of 2018, I was able to achieve a dream.