New Boston Registration Process Announced

good times wrote:

Without lowering the standards, this does nothing to fix the problem.

You are 100% wrong. By make the registering in tiers like that, it will improve the quality of the field by default. It sold out in 8 hours last year. This means that the people who will be missing out under this new format, will be the slowest qualifiers. This should load the field with the people who have the fastest times, and eliminate a lot of the slowest qualy's and make people start to aim for a faster time to give them a chance to even register. People won't be thinking...oh i can run a 3:15 and get on in the first hour and signup. Now they'll be thinking...i need to get in those higher tiers so i can get a spot for sure.

those women times are ridiculous honestly (yes I'm a guy), but a 3:40 marathon for a 25 y.o woman is not equivalent to a 3:10 marathon for a 25 y.o guy. Seriously.

I agree with you 100%. It doesn't even follow the age and gender charts. I believe the reasoning for this is trying to create a field of 50% men and women (think it was 60/40 last few years still). So to encourage equal participation the time for young woman was 3:40 and extrapolated from there.

Equal is not always far.

I train guys the bust their hump to run that 3:10, while I find most focused woman can hit there BQ with significantly less effort.

I am biased as well.

The qualifying window hasn't changed still though. So, a 2:40 marathon in October of 2011, will get you the standard needed to register on that first day for the 2013 race. Just run your fast marathon this year, in preparation for 2013.

This too is my only complaint, it seems they at least should have opened the first window at the same time as in the past. Those who had counted on Chicago and other early fall marathons better be scheduled and in shape for one this spring & summer if they want to run 2012!

Wes Mantooth wrote:

This is a good fix. My only complaint is I wish they had placed the registration period in November; allow people to get a qualifying time in a fall marathon. There's no reason to make people sign up 7 month in advance.

Another wrote:

I like this. And seeing that my BQ time for 2012 is already 26+ faster than the qualifying time I should have no problem registering....

26 minutes under? ... hobby jogger...

Great move Boston! I am happy with it. I wonder what JoggersWorld readers will say!

This is fine, but I'd rather see it based on age-grading to level the playing field between categories. It wouldn't be hard and it's not that confusing. (Everyone who's trying to BQ knows what age-grading is.) Instead of BQ-20, BQ-5, and BQ. They could just use, say, age-graded 73, 67, and 65 across the board.

I agree it's a jerk move by the BAA to do it in September instead of the end of November. The ING NYC Marathon currently closes its guaranteed entries immediately after the running of the Boston Marathon. They let that race be used towards their race and I don't think it's any coincidence that they picked those dates to accomodate people training for Boston. It's pretty mean of Boston to then shut out all these other major fall races when looking at qualifying for their race.

This makes things for 2013 pretty interesting, because we'll be getting tougher times AND less window for qualification if you assume the race fills in September. You'll really have to have had your crap together beforehand.

Considering that their website can't even handle the volume of runners going over to check the new rules, they may have one more change to make: get a new f***ing web administrator and infrastructure!

Any chance that the race will fill up or get close to capacity before the people who are less than 5 mins qualified register?

I like this idea! Who would have thought that the old boys club would be so progressive!

This is the best they could come up with? It's an asinine solution to a problem that didn't really exist. What are they going to do for the fast people who are too stupid to navigate the BAA website on registration day.

What is going to happen is that this race is going to become a race for younger people only. No that's fine if you are a 25-year old piss ant now, but you will be old at some point.

And how the F are they going to verify that you ran 20 minutes faster than your 3:10 or 3:40 BQ in time to make sure that all the registered are legit so that there are the correct number of openings for the next in line. Now, they verify people in a week or more. This will certain encourage - not faster running - but fraud.

I like this. Good job Boston.

Seriously Boston wrote:

This is the best they could come up with? It's an asinine solution to a problem that didn't really exist. What are they going to do for the fast people who are too stupid to navigate the BAA website on registration day.

What is going to happen is that this race is going to become a race for younger people only. No that's fine if you are a 25-year old piss ant now, but you will be old at some point.

And how the F are they going to verify that you ran 20 minutes faster than your 3:10 or 3:40 BQ in time to make sure that all the registered are legit so that there are the correct number of openings for the next in line. Now, they verify people in a week or more. This will certain encourage - not faster running - but fraud.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm pretty old (54), and I think this is terrific. I am sure that now people who are well under the qualifying times will have no difficulty registering, whatever their age. And anyone who commits fraud will simply be bounced, leaving more room those who just barely beat the qualifying standards. I see no significant implementation problems.

To my eyes it looks like BAA did a decent job with the changes. They raised the bar, which is a good thing, but not too much which keeps the bulk of runners in the game. They also put it somewhat on runners to run their best time in order to be able to get in earlier. I'm going to predict that we see a lot less times within 1-2 minutes of the qualifying standards. In the past I suspect runners, in some cases, did just enough to get the standard. Under the new policy you'll need to significantly exceed the standard to get yourself into one of the earlier registration pools.

For the 2012 marathon, the September 12-23, 2011 registration dates put the fall 2011 marathons in a bad place (i.e. on the outside) but this is really only a 1 year issue because for 2013 runners will be able to use their fall 2011 results to qualify.

I like that they included a provision for 10+ year Boston finishers. As long as those runners hit the standard they can register starting on trhe first day it opens. They say there are only about 500 in that group.

Would have liked to see them tighten up the women's standards a little but that was a no-win situation for them. If they had, you'd have heard charges of sexism from certain parties. If I'm BAA I'm probably saying to myself, leave that one alone.

I agree that it will be challenging for the BAA to verify the "20 minutes under the standard" in just 2 days before the "10 minutes under the standard" kicks in. There may not be that many entrants (relatively) at the "20 minutes under" point, but at "10 minutes under" I bet you have a lot of entrants. And at "5 minutes under" you will have a ton of the field. BAA only gave themselves a 3 day window to deal with that processing before regular entry opens. Good luck to them!

This still doesn't address the age grade discrepancy between males and females under age 40. With the new standards, the slowest qualifying time for a 34 year old female is age graded at 63.7% and for a 34 year old male at 67.5%. The same is true for the 35-39 age category. After 40 it evens out. For a female under 35 to match the qualifying standard that is set for men they should be running a 3:22. Considering the new rolling admission this gives a HUGE advantage to this age group, which is also the fastest growing demographic in the running community.

Yep, this is good for Boston. I do agree though they should tighten standards on the women's side. Trying to even the field percentage between men and women while ignoring proven gender grading goes against their new philosophy.

I'm a male currently beating the standard by 40 minutes so just an observation.

Agree, it's a good move by them and lets them have their cake and eat it too. Actually quite clever. (BAA clever?)

But its a long ways from the actual event and who knows where we'll be by then with injuries, prison time, etc.

I liked the old days where you could register a couple months before when you knew you were ready (at least that's how I choose to remember the old days...)

Compared to men, the womens standards became easier. It's still 30min but the % gap has become bigger.

We'll see how that plays out. Next year(s) may be the first time that sees more womens than mens runners in Boston.

One thing I like is that for men under 35, with the 2013 standards being 5 min faster AND the registration likely to be closed after the <10min wave, we're finally talking about joining two common goals: qualifying for Boston and breaking 3 hours will be hand in hand.