Running News Daily

Plenty of runners are qualifying for the 2020 Boston Marathon even though the time standards are five minutes faster across all age groups

Even With Tougher Standards, Plenty Of People Are Qualifying For Boston That makes it likely that not every applicant for the 2020 race will be accepted into the marathon during the annual September registration period.

Instead, runners will be facing what’s become an annual rite: guessing the “cutoff” time—how much faster than their qualifying times they had to be in order to gain entry into the race, because the race field is filled by the fastest runners first.

Last year’s cutoff was 4 minutes and 52 seconds. In all, 7,384 people who qualified were unable to get into the race.

For the past six years, as interest in qualifying for Boston has skyrocketed, not everyone who has qualified for the race has gotten in. The race accepts only about 24,000 time qualifiers. (Another 6,000 run for a charity or have another connection into the race that doesn’t require a qualifying time.) Tom Grilk, the BAA’s chief executive officer, told Runner’s World in February that the field size is unlikely to change soon and would require the cooperation of the eight cities and towns that the race passes through on its way from Hopkinton to Boston.

Race organizers had hoped that by tightening the qualifying times, fewer runners would be in the frustrating position of hitting the time needed for their age and gender but not gaining entry to the race.

“We adjusted the times last year, because we wanted to respond to runners and put more stringent qualifying times in effect for 2020, rather than wait longer and have even more runners achieve the standard but then be unable to be accepted due to field size limitations in 2020 and 2021,” a BAA spokesperson wrote in an email to Runner’s World.

Instead, the stricter time standards seem to have motivated potential Boston runners to train better and race faster. Some of the bigger qualifying races in the first half of 2019 have produced nearly the same number of qualifiers as they produced in 2018. Here’s a look at how some of the biggest feeder races into the Boston field have played out.

At the Boston Marathon this year, which every year qualifies the greatest number of people for the following year’s race, 8,883 bettered the time they needed for the 2020 race, according to data the BAA gave to Runner’s World. Last year, 9,254 hit the standard at Boston for the 2019 event. The decline is less than 4 percent.