Here's what I learned from interviewing over 100 runners who've BQ'ed

I expect something useful like this won't stay on the front page long, so I'll thank you now!

Doing my best to add real content to LR!

Pretty sure this has been posted before but still helpful info.

I have posted this before, but figured today was a good day to share it again.

I learned that you probably wasted a lot of your time. BOOM!

Penis

Why no copy/paste?

Can you just give us a synopsis?

Run lots, do tempo runs, be relatively young.

It's a 2-minute read. Get back on your ADD meds and push through it. I believe in you.Great work by the OP. Nice blog!

schere wrote:

Can you just give us a synopsis?

Glad you enjoyed it. For those looking for a cut and paste, here's the quick and dirty:

Some quick takeaways.

What can we take away from these results? Here are some initial thoughts, most of which are obvious. I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments.

You need to put in the miles – very, very few of the respondents did this on low mileage.

You need to do speed work – similarly, the vast majority of runners utilized some form of speed work.

People with lots of different body weights and compositions can BQ, but Boston Marathon Qualifiers tends to be lighter than the average American.

Getting a BQ happened to most respondents early in their running lives, usually after having run only for five or so years, and less than 10,000 miles.

There’s a lot more to mine in this data, and as the data base grows, I hope the results become more representative of the variety of people who’ve run a BQ. I’ll be doing some additional crunching of the numbers in the days to come. If you do some crunching of your own, get in touch so I can share the results.

the rest is here for those too lazy to scroll:

https://miloandthecalf.com/2016/01/05/data-analysis-of-the-boston-qualifier-questionnaire-part-i-overview/

Running an all out marathon is bad for the body!

Thanks for your contribution.

As a side-note, the weight you list as average for an American is blowing my mind. People are so fat in my area that I can't see guys being 190 average, and especially can't see women being 159 average.

Yeah, so two things on the weight number:

First, this statistic is self reported, so its possible people are misreporting. I went with the lowest average I found that appeared to be from a respectable source (this is from a gallup poll) because when you start talking about weight, the internet can get very angry.

Second, weight is pretty regional, I don't know where you live, but some obesity is much more prevalent in certain parts of the country.

Be cool to see a BMI scatter plot

The fat of the land wrote:

Thanks for your contribution.

As a side-note, the weight you list as average for an American is blowing my mind. People are so fat in my area that I can't see guys being 190 average, and especially can't see women being 159 average.

It actually blew my min for the opposite reason. I know a lot of the statistics floating around out there (~70% of American adults being overweight, etc), but It's crazy to me that the average male in the US is so heavy.

Wow, what research. It sounds like everything I already know. Funny, all I did was read the "good threads/training info" post by Carolina runner

Yeah, running is simple... and yet we obsess over it constantly. see e.g. this whole message board.

The article says that low mileage doesn't work but then says that the average total mileage for the year leading to the BQ was 1,750. That works out to 34 mpw. I'd argue that is low mileage.