Brian Rock An updated tracker, focused on the 2027 Boston Marathon cutoff time, is now live.The BAA announced the cutoff time for 2026 would be 4:34. Here’s a reflection on their announcement, along with my latest prediction and my original prediction. The Tableau dashboard below collects data from marathons, tracks the number of finishers who meet their … Read more
This week, Garmin dropped the details on its latest watches – the Garmin Instinct 3 AMOLED, Garmin Instinct 3 Solar, and the Garmin Instinct E. They’re not actually available for purchase yet, although they will be at the end of the week. But with the full specs released, this is a great opportunity to see … Read more
Last week ended up being more of a transition week than a real week of training. The intense cold kept me inside, and prevented me from getting in some of the real workouts that I had planned. But I did manage to get my mileage back up to 70 miles for the week – from … Read more
It’s New Year’s Day, and it’s time to take a look back at my year in running. I routinely reflect on my running – at the end of each week and after each big race. But doing so at the end of the year offers a really good opportunity to zoom out and put everything … Read more
The next big race on my calendar is the Fred Lebow Half Marathon in New York. I picked it, because I wanted to ensure that I had at least one chance to run a qualifying time for the NYC Marathon at a NYRR Half Marathon. The good thing about Fred Lebow is that anyone can … Read more
Last week, I published a brief analysis of the Valencia Marathon’s field – comparing it to other large races like Berlin, Chicago, and London. The takeaway – the Valencia Marathon has more sub-3:00 finishers than any other race in the world. Drilling down to young men, it has a very high percentage of runners going … Read more
Finding good stats on the largest marathons in the United States is – for some reason – difficult. A few years ago, I found myself looking for a list of the largest races. What I ended up finding was a bunch of listicles with mixed and match different methodologies of counting. Some races include multiple … Read more
Last week ended with the Rutgers Big Chill 5k. It wasn’t quite as good as I hoped, but it was a solid PR – and I’m happy with it. This week is something of a transition week. I plan to keep it fairly easy and take a bit of a down week before transitioning back … Read more
The Valencia Marathon has a reputation for being fast. Still, I was a surprised when I saw a headline that there were over 5,000 runners finishing sub-3:00 at this year’s race. Just how fast was this year’s Valencia Marathon? Most of my data analysis has focused on American marathons, plus the Abbott World Majors. Although … Read more
This year, there were a record number of qualifiers who applied to run the Boston Marathon. That led to a steep cutoff time of 6:51 for the 2025 race and new qualifying times for the 2026 race and beyond. A lot of people, myself included, hoped that would bring the cutoff time for future races … Read more