CCM Diary: Updated Report on the Effect of the New Boston Qualifying Times

Registration for the 2013 Boston Marathon is starting.  The BAA recently sent out early registration notices to the runners who have finished the last 10 (or more) consecutive Boston Marathons.  The rolling admission process for everyone else starts September 10.  So it seems like now is a good time to revisit my study of the effect of the new Boston qualifying standards on the number of potential entrants.

I can now compare the 2011 and 2012 results from MarathonGuide.com for 22 marathons with more than 108,000 finishers.  If I use the results from all 22 races, there’s a drop of almost 50% in the qualifying rate.  However, most of that drop comes from the Boston Marathon itself.   If I leave out the Boston numbers, the drop in the BQ rate is only about 20%.  Boston normally has a disproportionate number of qualifiers (for obvious reasons), but those numbers were hit hard by the heat in 2012.

The most important question, “How does this affect my chances of getting into Boston?”, remains unanswered.  If I had to guess, a 20% drop doesn’t seem like enough to keep Boston 2013 from filling up before I run Cape Cod at the end of October.  But if I run a BQ at the Cape, the new standards should help me get in in 2014.

Here are the numbers (for another look at my methodology, refer to my blog post from April):

		2011			2012
Marathon	#	#BQ	%	#	#BQ	%
Boston	23,879	10374	43.60%	21,554	2705	12.55%
City of Los Angeles	19,626	796	4.06%	18,729	667	3.56%
Cleveland	2,666	435	16.32%	2,594	220	8.48%
Disney World	13,512	638	4.72%	13,467	483	3.59%
Eugene	2,290	551	25.00%	2,345	467	20.50%
Foot Traffic Flat	393	81	20.60%	385	62	16.10%
Glass City	638	127	19.90%	778	144	18.50%
Grandma’s	6,333	1144	18.06%	5,785	695	12.01%
Houston	6,903	575	8.33%	7,637	997	13.05%
Light at the End of the Tunnel	271	57	21.00%	335	76	22.70%
Miami	3,484	369	10.59%	3,906	260	6.66%
Mississauga	1,066	258	24.20%	814	136	16.70%
National	2,877	419	14.56%	3219	158	4.90%
Ojai 2 Ocean	256	72	28.10%	800	188	23.50%
Ottawa	4,071	695	17.07%	4,178	640	15.70%
Pittsburgh	4,265	398	9.33%	4,608	287	6.23%
Pocono Mountain Run For The Red	630	184	29.20%	968	151	15.60%
Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona	5,062	703	13.89%	3,863	284	7.35%
Run Charlevoix	330	68	20.60%	331	49	14.80%
Sugarloaf	381	128	33.60%	563	99	17.60%
The San Francisco	5,999	468	7.80%	6,440	436	6.77%
Vancouver International	3,218	447	13.89%	4,232	481	11.37%
Total	108,151	18987	17.56%	104,312	9527	9.13%
(without Boston)	81,395	8194	10.22%	82,758	6822	8.12%

(3.9 mi. run; 146#)