Boston Marathon Gets Faster for 2016....By 2 Minutes and 28 Seconds

For the 2016 Boston Marathon, you didn't just need a Boston Qualifying (BQ) time, you needed to beat it by 2 minutes and 28 seconds. In the three years that this historic race has used their time-based registration process that allows runners who qualify 20 minutes/10 minutes/5 minutes faster to register ahead of the general qualifying population, this is the biggest cutoff gap on record (vs. 68 seconds last year). For 1,985 runners (16%) this year that had BQ's and applied to the 2016 race, that meant a rejection notice.

It all started when 19,000+ runners who beat their time by 5+ minutes signed up in the first week, leaving only 5,000 slots (about 3,000 less than previous years). Since only ~24,000 of the 30,000 runners are time qualifiers, that was a tight squeeze.

The qualifier breakdown for the 2016 race is:

- 4,744 qualifiers who were 20:00 or more under their standard.
- 7,495 qualifiers who were 10:00 or more under their standard.
- 6,849 qualifiers who were 5:00 or more under their standard.
- 4,540 qualifiers who were 2:28-4:59 under their standard.
- 404 qualifiers with an active streak of at least 10 years.

So it will be a fast one in 2016, and likely will just get all future qualifying runners to go even faster!

- SD