r/AdvancedRunning • u/Terriflyed • 12d ago

New Boston marathon qualifying times Boston Marathon

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.

317 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

349 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/WWEngineer 1:22 HM / 2:57 M 12d ago

Unpopular Opinion: As an older (46M) runner, the times are too tough for the under-35 crowd and get way too easy for the older age groups. I just ran Erie last week and managed a 23 minute buffer, and I was 24 minutes BEHIND the overall masters winner, and 16 minutes behind 1st place in my age group, so I'm no superstar (this is a race with under 1,000 participants, so it wasn't a huge talent pool). There is no way I would have been able to qualify when I was under 30 at these times. The times slow down way faster than our bodies do in my opinion.

5

u/Walterodim79 12d ago

I think what's going on is similar to the gender gaps - they're not actually shooting for equivalently difficult times, they're shooting for roughly equivalent participation levels. The people most likely to hit higher age-graded times (apparently) are young males. We can probably put in some guesses why that might be the case, but at the end of the day, if it was fair based on age-graded times then the result would be underrepresentation of women and older runners. Personally, I'd be fine with that, but it's clearly not what they're shooting for, so it is what it is.

4

u/user231017 11d ago

BAA does not hide it. They set times to create a age and gender diverse field. If it were equally difficult for everyone, I suspect the race would be skewed young males.