It’s the week we’ve all been waiting for: registration for the 2027 Boston Marathon. Over the course of the past year, I’ve been tracking results from marathons across the country (and the world) to project the likely cutoff time. The last races were held last Sunday, and at this point data is all collected. So … Read more
Last summer, the BAA announced a new downhill results index that would penalize qualifying times from races with excessive net elevation drop. This applied to the various Tunnel races, REVEL races, and a handful of other races. At the start of this qualifying period, I predicted that these changes would likely have a small impact … Read more
This is a question that’s been lingering throughout the year. The 2025 Berlin Marathon was one of the first races in the qualifying period for the 2027 Boston Marathon. The weather was unseasonably warm and number of BQ’s at the race was much lower than usual. Certainly that means fewer applicants. But just how big … Read more
Last month, BAA announced a new lottery for runners who met their Boston qualifying marathon time but did not make the cutoff. They will put 1,000 spots aside for these runners, suggesting that the odds of getting in this way will be about 8 to 10%. But an interesting side effect of this lottery is … Read more
A couple of weeks ago, a new study was released that analyzed pacing data from the 2015, 2016, and 2017 Boston Marathons. The title, “Pacing strategy patterns and performance outcomes in marathon runners,” is interesting. But when you dig into the methodology, I’m not sure they actually measured and analyzed what they expected to examine. … Read more
This week, the Boston Athletic Association made a big announcement about registration for the 2027 Boston Marathon: there would be a new lottery for runners who met their qualifying time but missed the cutoff time. They also announced the dates for registration: September 14 to September 18. This means that the weekend of September 12-13 … Read more
Feature image from Governor Healy on Flickr. This week, the Boston Athletic Association released the entry list for the 2026 Boston Marathon. Athletes can log into Athletes’ Village to see their corral assignment, but that isn’t publicly available. The only information in the searchable entry list is a runner’s name, age, city, state, country of … Read more
The final results have been uploaded to the tracker and I posted my final projection for the 2027 Boston Marathon Cutoff Time here. The outlook moderated somewhat in the last few weeks, and at this point I’d expect the cutoff time to be around 5:20 to 5:30. A new tracker, focusing on the 2028 Boston … Read more
The BAA made two changes to registration for the 2027 Boston Marathon. The more subtle change involved the start of the qualifying period and eliminating the ability to use a small subset of races to qualify for two different Boston Marathons. The big news was the new rules for downhill marathons. For years now, (some) … Read more
The BAA announced two changes for registration for the 2027 Boston Marathon. The big headline was the downhill results index. The subtler change was the beginning of the qualifying period for the 2027 Boston Marathon – and the elimination of the double dipping period. For the last several years, the start of the next qualifying … Read more