If you want to start a heated discussion with a group of runners, ask them how they feel about downhill races. To some, they’re tantamount to cheating — an easy way to boost your time by 5 or 10 minutes (or more), claim a new PR, and qualify for Boston. To others, they’re a perfectly … Read more
For the past few months, I’ve been tracking the results of marathon finishers around the world in an attempt to project the cutoff time for the 2026 Boston Marathon. I put together a live tracker, and I published an early analysis in December and a follow-up in January. The emerging picture suggested that the new qualifying times reduced the … Read more
When I ran my first marathon — Atlantic City, 2021 — I didn’t know much about this whole world of marathon running. But as soon as I finished, I was hooked. I sat at the beach bar, recovering from the race with a nice cold beer, Googling and planning out my next steps. What should I run … Read more
Recently, the BAA released the field of entrants into the 2025 Boston Marathon. On the website, you can look up an individual runner or search for filtered groups of runners. The data includes their bib number, wave, corral, name, age, city, state, and country. For some reason, the current list does not include gender. Last … Read more
Feature photo by Naoki Nakashi on Flickr – CC BYSA 2.0 It’s been a couple of weeks now since the Tokyo Marathon. I wrote up a general analysis of the data from the race, and I followed that up with an exploration of how the field varied throughout the corrals. But that preliminary data was … Read more
Feature photo by nakashi on Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 2.0. Scenes from the 2024 Tokyo Marathon This past weekend was the Tokyo Marathon — the first Abbott World Marathon Major of 2025. Last year was an exciting one for the series: So what does this year have in store us? The 2024 Tokyo Marathon was exciting in its … Read more
Last week, I published an analysis of the new Boston Marathon qualifying times. That analysis quite clearly shows that the qualification rate – the percentage of runners in a given age group who run a qualifying time – increases with age. A few age groups in particular – 45-49, 60-64, and 65-69 – had disproportionately … Read more
There’s an old saying that if you want to qualify for Boston, you don’t have to get faster. Just get older. When I analyzed the qualifying times last year, I found that to be generally true. The qualification rate – the percent of runners in a given age group who meet their qualifying time for … Read more
This weekend, I published an analysis of the new Boston Marathon qualifying times – and whether they hit certain age groups harder than others. As I concluded that analysis, I noticed that the distribution of runners in the Boston Marathon and across all marathons in the United States were quite different. The 45-49 age group … Read more
Last week, I put together an analysis showing the average marathon times of runners throughout the United States in 2024. A question tangential to that analysis was how the average finish times changed from 2023 to 2024. Specifically, as I’ve analyzed data for the Boston Marathon Cutoff Tracker, I’ve noticed that a slightly higher percentage … Read more