The cut time is going to be WAY under.

The qualifying look back period to Sept 2018 means people can use times achieved when they were 3 years under their 2021 bracket. What? That plus the smaller field....I am going with 8 minutes under to get the golden ticket.

edited down to 8 because of the lack of international participants

To offset that a bit: how many runners have historically been international participants? It will be much harder to get visas this year due to the US embassies closed or backed up on applications around the world.

Update: about 2/3rds are US citizens. The point is - the field size has come down, but so has the geographical pool of participants.

good point I didn't consider. I think we will be able to travel by then, I dont think you can plan on it though.

Agree 8 min sounds right. Remind me if you dont take your slot does it roll down? I dont recall them having a roll down.

That would be too time consuming.

This year everyone who wants to run who ran under the qualifying time will have 3 days in April to register. BAA will then figure it out and let in the fastest people for each age division. Only those people will have the credit cards hit for the registration fee.

Keep in mind some people may have "aged up" since then, so not only is it a smaller field, but a lot of people will have met their qualifying time by a lot more. This will further affect people on the cusp of the qualifying time. People will need a pretty good cushion to get in I think. (Of course, depends if overseas people can/want to come - and how people are feeling about doing a race with 20K other people.)

I'm hopeful I have enough of a cushion, and excited to race. Does this mean I have to start training?!

yup right, they have all the numbers up front, so no need for roll down. Thanks for the reminder. I've only got 3 min, but wife has 7 so fingers crossed for her.

I disagree. Chicago Marathon, Kona Worlds and a host of other semi large marathons are the same weekend. Throw in “potential” travel restrictions...I don’t think it will be that much under. I will be running it but know of several training partners looking at 2022 instead.

We shall see

I am conflicted for Boston this year. I’m really curious about qualifying for 2022. Normal timeline would be that you would have from sept 2020 to Sept 2021 to post a qualifying time. I haven’t run a marathon since 2019 Boston, and don’t expect to do so by September this year (the few that are scheduled to take place are filled). I’m wondering if they will extend the look-back or go to the end of 2021 for the 2022 qualifying period.

I'm curious what 2022 will look like. I was fortunate enough to get my first BQ at a small local marathon this past fall, so I should be in the normal qualifying window for 2022. In normal years I should have enough cushion to race (2:56:40, so a 3:20 cushion), but I was thinking about trying for this year since my run fitness is even a little better than the fall (though `3:20 is unlikely to be enough in the small field for 2021). I also want to race Boston when it's truly Boston again with spectators, full field, expo, etc.