Last Monday was the Boston Marathon, and it was an exciting one. There were a record number of applicants for this year’s race, and there was incredible demand to be there on race day. After a miserable year last year, when the heat decimated the field, runners had near-perfect weather. The elites finished in blazing … Read more
Feature photo courtesy of erp3d on reddit The 2025 Boston Marathon was an exciting race to watch. The women shattered the existing course record, and the men laid down some of the fastest times in the history of Boston. Among those was Conner Mantz, who challenged for the podium before finishing in fourth place in … Read more
Feature photo courtesy of erp3d on reddit Recently, I did two in depth analyses of data related to the six star finishers. I published the last one last week – in the lead up to Boston – and I thought it would be interesting to do a quick follow up to see what changed with … Read more
Yesterday was a huge day in Boston. Not only did the elites lay down some blazing fast times – Sharon Lokedi and the top three women all broke the previous course record, while John Korir now holds the third fastest time in Boston history and Conner Mantz narrowly missed becoming the fastest American ever – … Read more
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
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
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