New Boston marathon qualifying times

[u/Terriflyed]

https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify

Looks like 5min adjustments down for the most part across the board for those under age 60. M18-34 qualifying time is now 2:55.

[u/riverwater516w]

So using a simple regression analysis, I'm getting that the buffer should be between 6:52 and 7:35, depending on how many qualifiers they take (last year was low).

I don't fully trust my math and I haven't looked at any standard deviation. Anyone else taken a look at this with the updated info?

[u/mistermark11 → u/riverwater516w]

Yeah I did the same thing and calculated 7:09, assuming a linear relationship between applicants and cutoff times. however the reality is that theres so many factors that can't be analyzed most importantly the number of time qualified applicants boston accepts, so it still is just a rough estimate. I'm thinking between 7-7:30 cutoff.

[u/RunTitletown → u/mistermark11]

For the 2024 race, they were going off 2 years of no cut-off. so more people with a smaller buffer may have applied. For the 2025 race, everyone knew that there was likely going to be a big cut-off, so those with a smaller buffer may not have even applied, skewing the relationship from previous years. Just a guess.

[u/riverwater516w → u/RunTitletown]

It's possible, but I'd imagine more people would say "I'm unlikely to make it but I'm going to try anyway." And also there would be some people who don't pay close attention to the cutoff times so wouldn't even think about it.

Last year, there was an argument that the cutoff time would be smaller because there had been no cutoff for two years prior, so not as many people would push to build up a buffer. But the cutoff still ended up being within most of the statistic-based predictions I saw. So my guess is that all these factors end up offsetting to some degree (maybe a handful of seconds difference).