Boston tightening time window again

Triathlon Forum
21

hahah no not appalled at anyone running xc just how slow it is around here. I also see times from a lot of 5ks around here and in the RDU area and think “wow that’s not fast for a winning 5k time.”

I really enjoy working with the kids. I took over a team that had a toxic culture, at a school that has had 1 sub 5 min miler in the last 10 years. The culture is now open arms, everyone likes running with each other and the kids that returned from last year are anywhere from :20-2min/mile faster on our home course. I changed it this year making it a little harder compared to last year and allow the parents to see more of their kids running. Got to keep the parents happy. AD is so happy with how things are going he got the entire JV & Varsity cheer squad out for our first home meet.

My kids love coming out to practice and I really enjoy working with them.

I just really shocked at how slow XC is around here. I coach a HS kid in CA who was inside the top 30 fastest times in the state last year. I coach a female in TX who is a 2:18/5:15 freshman. She’d crush just about everyone in this school district currently.

If you’re running 17 flat you’re a baller around here. My CA kid does tempo runs at that pace.

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22

had to look it up - RDU = the “research triangle” - Duke, Chapel Hill, NC State. Nice work DD, sounds like you’ve improved the culture, keep it up and good luck!

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23

5.8 deg

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24

I don’t think that’s what Frank Shorter meant when he said “Hills are Speedwork in disguise”

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Doesnt mention any grade of 15%… and its mainly sprinting.

Queens st mile of Molenberg Mile series in Auckland, New Zealand, had fastest downhill mile time ever - 3:28

looks like this is the segement (the run one is messed up on strava). Has 2 peak grades of 15%
https://www.strava.com/segments/7013644

26

When I did my first Marathon the qualifying time for my age groups was 3:10. Then I aged up and it became a 3:20. Then they tightened standards and it became a 3:10 again. I aged up again last year and was back to the 3:20. So if they change the standard again, I could be back down to 3:10. :slight_smile: EDIT - Nope, it looks like I now am at 3:15 for a BQ

I found a historically listing of qualifying times once and was surprised that they used to be like a 3:00 to get into to Boston. So, the times don’t ways tighten. There are changes where they loosen too. I did Boston in 2023. They had a zero buffer time to get in. I expected as much since they did races in both the spring and fall the year before to make up for missed race opportunities during covid. The fall race they only had something like 23,000 applications for a 25,000 person race cap. I expected similar number for the 2023 race which they did. All big races have caps. The race permit from the municipality set the limit based on how many they can reasonable accommodate on their streets, etc. for the race. Yes, $600/night for hotels near the finish line. It is a spendy race for sure.

My first marathon was a 3:14 so when 6-7 of the guys who were in my training group were signing up to go to Boston together I had to sit it out having missed the BQ by 4 minutes. It was about 12 years before I got a BQ time. Many people spend years and years trying to get a BQ time and when they don’t get in due to buffer time pushing them out I really feel bad for them. There are guys that go every year that are consistently 20+ minutes under their BQ time. It doesn’t seem fair that they get to go any time they want to and as many times as they want to when other who work 10 times harder trying to get in have to stay home. It feels like you are at a World Champions ship when you get there though. At my qualifying marathons I might only see 5-6 people in the last 6 miles of the race. On a good day I am passing them one by one moving up my positions in the race. Boston was totally different. The last six miles I saw about 3,000 runners. I was not passing anyone or moving up in my position at all. I felt like I was in white water rapids with swarms of people passing all around me in groups of 5-6 people wide. It was an surreal moment that I will never forget. Ya…you don’t want to dilute that. You do want all of those people who work for years and years to BQ to have their chance to run Boston and have their own Boston moment though.

27

I know it’ll never happen but I’d think it would be reasonable for the BAA set aside a group of slots for a lottery composed of people who’ve never met the cutoff but have qualified. At least then some of the people with qualifying times but still not fast enough would have a chance. Maybe give people additional lottery tickets for multiple years of qualifying but missing the cut.

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28

It was actually 2;50 and under in my day for the under 40 group. I made the cutoff many times pretty easily, but never had the time in my schedule to do the race. 40 years later I might just give it a go if my calf agrees with my brain… (-;

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29

The BAA doesn’t have the same incentive as Ironman to keep people in the pipeline, especially if there’s more than ample growth in Marathoning.

Ironman wants to keep people doing its feeder races and so it makes sense to dangle a legacy system for people who are committed to making it happen.

The BAA, so long as it’s races are filled, has no incentive to have people doing marathons outside their races.

30

Sub 2:50:00 is an impressive time. When I started marathons in my goal, at the time, was to run a sub 3-hour. Running Boston was NOT one of my marathon goals, but every year when Boston came around my wife said she wanted me to run Boston so we could travel to the race together. I would have to reminder her every year that you have to qualify for Boston and she would ask what I had to do to qualify. Since I took a 12 year hiatus from Marathons I would tell her the first step was to actually run a marathon. :wink: I did a 2:54 a my first marathon back for a 20 minute PR and first place over all master. After qualifying I had to do Boston since I might never do another marathon and never be qualified again. :slight_smile:

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they do have those slots, charity slots. need to raise amounts near $25k or so…

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6:51 is the official cut off.

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But to make those slots available they’d have to make the buffer a little bit bigger, and some people would miss out because of that. What about them?

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I don’t understand why they didn’t tighten the standard by 7.5 or 10 minutes. Now it’s going to be the same next year, just a smaller unknown drop relative to the ‘qualifying’ time.

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Yeah, that’s true… Making the system fair when there are more people qualified than the field allows is a difficult problem. I just feel bad for the people who keep qualifying but still miss out because they weren’t fast enough year after year while at the same time there are people who’ve done it many times and get to keep coming back.

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It’s not difficult. Adjust the cut off for net drop. Flat chicago 2:55, revel mountain drop races 2:35 (-20)

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37

Thank you all for the input!

38

I’d actually warn people about overestimating their ability (by a lot) about the Revel big mountain drop races. I’ll admit that I ran the big Mt Charleston marathon a bunch of years back, hoping to run a lifetime best in the marathon with the obvious massive cheater-drop of 5000 feet, and the way-faster ‘average’ marathon time posted on the website (3:57 Revel vs 5:20 LA marathon.) I’ve run the LA marathon twice, so I suspected at the worst, I’d do about the same.

I trained a lot for the race, averaging about 65mpw, which meant a bunch of weeks 70+, and on the Pfitiznger Advanced Marathoning program, which has gotten me to 3:13 on a fair course but on a hot day in San diego, and a 1:25 half marathon in more favorable course conditions.

Despite all that training, my legs got totally trashed after 14 miles on the Mt Charleston course, despite not running faster than my target pace. The downhill was wayyy more extreme than anything I’d ever experienced - it felt great for 5 miles, but by 14 miles, with the unrelenting lack of flat/uphill, if you haven’t practiced this kind of running for 3hrs+ downhill continuously (which is really, really hard to find a course to do it on), you’ll be in a world of hurt. I ran -20minutes slower than expected, even for a non-A result. (-30 minutes compared to my race calculator paces compared to 10k and HM races I ran during the training cycle.) I also specifically did NOT overheat it on the first half - I took it ‘easy’, barely even getting to mid-z2 HR because I knew the leg beatdown was coming, but it was way worse than expected.

I’m almost certain it was the course, and not my training, because after having to run-walk a bunch of miles at miles 19-21 because specific leg muscles were cramping, the race flattens out in the last 2 miles - and the moment I hit the flattish inclines, I dropped 2 miles at 6:50/mile, and was accelerating to the finish since it felt so easy. I was finally able to use the training that I’d developed, which was all blocked by a few errant cramping muscles on that crazy downhill.

I’m certain the crazy fast average times there are because it’s targeted by people who are already marathon-experienced, so the average time is faster say compared to the LA marathon where there are a huge number of rookies aiming to walk most of it. You’d hear on the internet for sure if people were regularly running -15, -20 minutes faster than their PRs there, but it barely comes up.

The races that seem to consistently go super fast are the cool, flattish or even better, SLIGHT donwhill races. CIM seems to be one of the fastest (as is Chicago) - my run and tri buddies who I have beaten at every run race distance have a CIM-specific marathon PR faster than mine, despite me beating them pretty handily at literally every single other race including other marathons, including in tuneup races in the same cycle. I’d love to run CIM in the future, but I’m doubtful, as my ankle arthritis has unfortunately probably taken me out of the marathon game (hence tri.)

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I hear this – some of those super downhill races run a good portion of them at altitude. Some people will destroy their quads if they don’t practice downhill running. But, I think they should draw the line somewhere. Plenty of OTQ slightly downhill courses to choose from. I don’t think it makes sense to let someone in who ran a second faster on a downhill course than someone on a flatter course. Weather is a huge factor in the marathon & you can’t really control for that. I would think about the downhill courses. There are people running minutes faster because of those courses than someone who misses by a handful of seconds, & I would argue the better performance was on the more honest course.

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I will highly bet that someone that does ‘typical’ marathon training, specifically, not doing regular all-megadownhill long runs (which is most people) will run a LOT faster at CIM than Revel with the megadrop. CIM runners go so fast compared to what I expect them to run based on their 10k and HM times (at least the ones in my tri clubs) that it’s almost unbelievable.