The Boston Marathon's tougher qualifying times aren't really new

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On Monday, the organizers of the Boston Marathon introduced more-difficult qualifying times for the sport's most revered race, lowering them by exactly five minutes for runners under 60 years old.

Boston's first qualifying-time adjustment since 2019 was pretty big news in the distance-running community, and it even broke through in the mainstream media. But some reports lacked a critical piece of context, which is that these "new" qualifying standards have, in effect, already been in place for some time.

Let me explain.

One of the hardest things about qualifying for the Boston Marathon these days is that the posted time for your age category is actually just the bare minimum. For example, say you're a man age 45-49. That means your qualifying time is now 3 hours 15 minutes, which you must achieve in an accredited marathon during the one-year window leading up to the application deadline next September.

But here's the rub: running a 3:15:00 (or better) doesn't automatically give you a spot in Boston — it simply allows you to submit an application. The field is capped at 30,000 runners, and many of those spots are allocated to people raising money for charity. That leaves only around 22,000 entries for qualifiers, and in the last couple years many thousands more than that have submitted applications.

The way organizers decide which applicants get to run Boston is fair and meritocratic but nonetheless pretty cold. They simply lower what's known as the "cutoff" time by the same amount in each age/gender category until they're left with the desired number of runners. Anyone above the cutoff is out of luck.

Until pretty recently, the cutoff time wasn't all that severe. From 2012 through 2015 it was never more than 1:38 faster than the posted qualifying time (including a year with no cutoff at all) and in the next two years it averaged 2:18.

But, as distance running became more popular and advances in shoe technology helped make everyone faster, the cutoff grew to 4:52 by 2019. The pandemic threw everything off for the next few years, but the cutoff returned with a vengeance for this year's race, climbing to 5:29. A record 33,058 applications were submitted — meaning more than 11,000 runners (or one in every three) who met the qualifying standard were denied entry.

Guessing the cutoff for the upcoming Boston Marathon in April 2025 became a kind of parlour game for recreational distance runners leading up to the application deadline last week. We still don't know exactly what it will be — the Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the race, promised to let anxious applicants know by early October — but it's probably going to blow that 5:29 out of the water. After the BAA announced Monday that it received 36,406 applications (breaking last year's record by more than 3,000), the general consensus on reddit and among the people I talk to about running seems to be somewhere in the range of a seven-minute cutoff, and maybe a bit higher.

Given that context, you can see why the BAA's decision to lower the official qualifying times by five minutes isn't really a big deal. In effect, the athletes had already done it for them by getting faster and faster (and more numerous) each year in this new golden age of distance running. You might even say the tougher standards are good for runners because they provide a more realistic idea of what it will actually take to get into Boston (though the new times probably still don't go far enough).

Since I've written about my own marathon running experiences from time to time in this newsletter, I'll fill you in on what all this means for me.

After qualifying for last year's Chicago Marathon (the one where the late Kelvin Kiptum broke the world record) I decided to take a run at the 2026 Boston Marathon this fall. It won't be easy: I ran a personal-best 3:17:16 in Chicago (only an hour and 17 minutes behind Kiptum, thank you very much) and the Boston qualifying time in my age category just fell from 3:20:00 to 3:15:00. I kind of saw that coming, though, and have been training toward a goal time in the 3:12 range — five minutes better than that PB from last year and three minutes under my posted qualifying time.

Can I pull that off next month? I don't know. It feels like a bit of a stretch and I think I'll need favourable weather and a bunch of other things to go right on race day. Even if they do, I'll be crossing my fingers until next September to see if my time actually gets me into Boston. If not, you can add me to the growing group of poor souls who earned a BQ but didn't get to run the world's greatest marathon.