The Boston Problem
Almost every year for the last two decades I have run the Boston Marathon. I’ve grown up and grown older as Boston evolved. From the early days as race for a small number of club elites and professionals to today’s strange monster of a city race trying to hang on to it’s purest roots.
How did I start running Boston? When I got back into running in my 30’s I followed the same track that many road runners do. I started small and got hooked. I started looking for bigger things to do. Things that would verify the excesses of the habit.
As a born and bred citizen of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Boston Marathon was hard to miss. At a time when long distance running was confined to a smallish sub-demographic of aficionados, the city of Boston and its surroundings has always been in love with its Patriot’s Day event.
Clearly Boston as a city is culturally unique. You get the impression that Bostonians think they’re better than everyone else. Indeed, they rightly or wrongly consider themselves the Hub of the Universe. This partially explains the love affair with the Boston Marathon by an urban populace that would rather stay inside and make snide remarks about other cities most of the time.
Bostonians embrace the Boston Marathon because it was always special, always unique, always the place where those ‘in the know’, the insiders went. In the local world of Massachusetts running when one says, “Are you running the Marathon?”, no one asks “Which Marathon?” We all know what you mean.
In Boston, there is only one marathon that is important. It is just another one of those things that we culturally horde and declare “Ours is the best!”
When I started running seriously again it wasn’t hard for me to find the Boston Marathon. It flows in the streets like the blood of the city hereabouts. Those old timers hold on to their Boston Marathon stories like a secret club handshake.
Somewhere in the last 20 years our local bragging rights race went viral.
It was always global. Boston always attracted the elites and special runners of the world. But it’s an entirely different animal now. Every distance runner in the world is training for Boston.
You’ve always had to qualify for the Boston Marathon. There is no ‘general admission’ option. You have to earn a place. The way you do this is by proving that you can run a fast marathon time. The way you prove it is to run another certified marathon in said time.
This is called a ‘BQ’ or a ‘qualifying marathon’.
There are a couple of big challenges to this. First, racing a qualifying marathon is hard. You can’t race a marathon every day, or every week. You need time to recover from a marathon effort. Second, it takes a big investment in time and energy to make a good marathon attempt. These two things run counter to each other to make each race effort overwhelmingly important.
If you have an injury, don’t have a good training cycle, get a bad day, have some bad weather it can sideline your attempt and now your stuck until your next opportunity. It takes most runners 3-4 months to prepare for a qualification attempt. This means you only get 2-4 tries a year, and that’s if all you do is train for marathons.
When I first qualified, I was 34 years old. I needed to run a 3:10 qualification race. At the time there was so little interest in running the Boston Marathon the organizers gave you the extra 59 seconds as well. I needed to run a 3:10:59 to be guaranteed an entry into the 1998 Boston Marathon.
I trained hard all summer and ran a 3:09 and change and was quite thrilled with myself.
If I was 34 today, I would need to run a 3:05 or better (no :59 second buffer) to meet the 2020 standard. But, it doesn’t end there. That 3:05 would not get me into the race. The Boston Marathon is so competitive now that meeting the standard does not guarantee an entry. You have to beat the standard.
Last year 7,384 runners made the standard, but still didn’t get in. The ‘cut off’ was 4:28, meaning you had to run 4 minutes and 28 seconds faster than the qualification standard to get in. For 2020 they tightened the standards by 5minutes to make up for this ‘cut off’ problem. It’s any one’s guess as to how much you’ll need to beat the new standards by to get in.
If you ask people what the qualification standards should be, they will respond with whatever their current best pace is. The translation is basically ‘I should be able to run’.
Boston, a victim of its own success, now dances this slightly insane demarcation line of meritocracy.
Bringing it all around to me, as I always do, like a boorish party guest, I find myself every year saying I’m not going to run Boston again. The commitment is too big. I’m getting too old. Etc. etc. etc.
And then I run Boston again.
The BAA has made side arrangements for people like me. I still have to qualify, but if you have completed 10-straight Boston marathons you are allowed to register early and don’t have to worry about the cut off problem. You still need to be qualified. If you have 25 straight Bostons I think you get an automatic entry.
Today I am out of qualification. I cannot seem to make the new standard. I ran two qualifying races, even at the new standard, for my last two Bostons but this one has been a stinker. I’m on my 5th try-and-miss as of this week after last weekends last-ditch attempt. To keep my streak going I’m going to need a charity bib.
It’s not just the tighter time standards it’s the new qualification windows. In the old days we would train for and run a qualification race in the fall. This would qualify us for two years. This meant you could take your focus off racing every so often and still have time to recover and requalify.
With the new standards and new windows, you not only have to run faster you have to qualify sooner and more often. This puts you on a constant hamster wheel of high-volume, high quality road training that is very specific. That’s a recipe for fragility and it also sucks a lot of the fun out of the sport.
I’m going to keep trying. Because it’s what I do. I have no issues with the meritocracy. Some small, greedy part of me feels like something has been taken away. But that’s not true. Boston has given me so much and when it’s my time to leave the party I’ll thank my hosts and try to be gracious.
But until that time, I’ll see you out there.