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
Since the fall, I’ve been collecting data to project the cutoff time for the 2026 Boston Marathon. I’ve put together a Tableau dashboard to help you explore the data in real time, which you can play with here. While that tracker is updated on a weekly basis, I take a step back from time to … Read more
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 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
Last month, I posted a lengthy analysis of the Chicago Marathon results. Part of that analysis was whether runners managed a negative split or not. Subsequently, I’ve done some more thinking about this issue. After some discussions around the data, I came up with a different way to think about the problem. Instead of looking … Read more
Many runners have strong opinions about Boston’s qualifying times and their selection process. People will inevitably complain that it’s unfair for one group or another. I recently saw a post in a Facebook group suggesting that the process was unfair for women – and that the new qualifying times would make things more unfair. This … Read more