Can tall runner qualify for Boston?

Your weak taped nipples show you took off the shirt last minute. LAME sauce.

Also it looks like someone who used to be fat and had a lot of Lipo... I would bury those pics

I love the basketball shorts...

anothertallguy wrote:

I'm 6'4" about 185 lbs normally...hard training will get me down to around 175 lbs. I'm not that great or anything but I went sub 16 5k, 1:13 half, sub 2:40 marathon last year. It's doable, just train and dont get hurt

You are amazing! I wish I had those times. Thanks for the encouragement.

cappercrapper wrote:

outside running wrote:

Jim Walmsley is 6'4" and the current world mountain running long distance champion. I think Joe Gray is also around that height and the current (and two-time) world mountain running champion

Walms is 5-10 at best

Google says he is 6'0"

I'm 6'4" but about 40 lbs lighter so I never considered the heat dissipation to be an issue for me. Got the BQ on the first marathon.

-RS

Jason Hatman with multiple 4th place finishes at Boston was 6'3" and according to what I found online 203 lbs. I think he must have been a little less in his competition days but he was definitely a big guy. I doubt he was much lighter than you. So yes it is possible for a runner your size to qualify.

mortyd wrote:

Hardloper wrote:

Oh come on, taller people tend to have a higher surface area to mass ratio, not lower. Just drop all these lame excuses and run more

Read this article and you will understand what I’m saying. It describes the exact thing I have noticed about mass/surface area.

Garbage article, good runners over 6' are everywhere. The fact is very tall people in general are rare, especially in East Africa, but it makes minuscule difference on performance. What you are doing is blaming your performance on something you can't control with negligible impact (height) rather than things you can control that would have huge impact (your weight and especially your training, which is greatly lacking).

I’m 37 - 6’4” and 215 - I came decently close @ 3:16:xx running about 40/50 miles a week in Chicago last year. If I was 185 it works be a done deal I think.

6'4" 215lb ex-rower James Cracknell ran 2hr43 at London 2017 at age 45.

https://www.tri247.com/triathlon-features/analysis/james-cracknell-perfect-marathon

Hardloper wrote:

Garbage article, good runners over 6' are everywhere. The fact is very tall people in general are rare, especially in East Africa, but it makes minuscule difference on performance. What you are doing is blaming your performance on something you can't control with negligible impact (height) rather than things you can control that would have huge impact (your weight and especially your training, which is greatly lacking).

When I watch Galen Rupp race he towers a full head over the competition and he is 5’11” and 135 lbs. I just don’t see anyone that looks like me running at an elite level. This signals to me that height and weight do play a significant role in distance running performance. That is the reason I asked the question to this group. I wanted to know how large the effect is and whether it can be overcome. My personal opinion after reading the responses is that weight has a huge effect on performance, but height to a much lesser extent. This is heavily controlled by genetics though. In many cases taller people can be big-boned with lots of muscle mass. It is unlikely Lebron James will qualify for Boston even though he is in fantastic athletic shape. In other cases, tall people can be rail thin like 6’2” Jon Anderson who won Boston in 1973 (previous poster gave him 2 extra inches of height).

The extension of the height/weight question is: “Do you believe that anybody can qualify for Boston with the right training?” I hope I’m totally wrong, but I personally don’t think so. This may be pessimistic, but I think there are some people on planet earth that no matter how much training they do they will never be able to qualify for Boston due to their genetics. This sounds like the premise for a great reality tv show!

Back to the original question— I’ve never met someone in real life, nor seen someone on TV, that has my height and weight and can run extremely efficiently. I’m not looking for excuses, just want to know my chances if I fully commit and put in the hours and sweat.

Thankfully, several big/tall people have responded in this thread that they did qualify for Boston, or are very close to it. This gives me hope! You can’t fault me for wanting to learn whether it was realistically possible before I fully commit to training. I realize my best shot is to drop as much weight as possible, stay healthy and put in the miles.

RunnerSam wrote:

cappercrapper wrote:

Walms is 5-10 at best

Google says he is 6'0"

I'm 6'4" but about 40 lbs lighter so I never considered the heat dissipation to be an issue for me. Got the BQ on the first marathon.

-RS

6-0 is probably correct for Walmsley. Based on a thread from last year (link below), the wikipedia article that says 6'0" now said 6'4" last year, so it's been corrected.

Joe Gray is in the 6'4" range though. Here he is next to 5-11 Canaday and 5-6 Hillary Bor (left).

mortyd wrote:

Hardloper wrote:

Garbage article, good runners over 6' are everywhere. The fact is very tall people in general are rare, especially in East Africa, but it makes minuscule difference on performance. What you are doing is blaming your performance on something you can't control with negligible impact (height) rather than things you can control that would have huge impact (your weight and especially your training, which is greatly lacking).

When I watch Galen Rupp race he towers a full head over the competition and he is 5’11” and 135 lbs. I just don’t see anyone that looks like me running at an elite level.

East African men average about 5-6/7 if you look at the wiki article below. The distribution of height of elite runners within their own home countries, whether USA or Kenya, isn't biased towards shorter people. David Rudisha is 6-3 and Paul Tergat is 5-11.5.

kingojamin wrote:

You would be better off on a flat course. Hills don't favor the tall runners.

Thought of another tall runner that is great on hills: François D'Haene is 1.92 (6-4) and won UTMB three times. In 2017, he beat Kilian Jornet, Tim Tollefson, Xavier, Walmsley, and Capell.

The distribution of height of elite runners within their own home countries, whether USA or Kenya, isn't biased towards shorter people.

This is exactly the data that I want to look at. Just saying that statement doesn’t make it true. I think it is actually skewed toward shorter people but I don’t have hard data to prove it. I’m surprised at the resistance to the idea that shorter distance runners have a competitive advantage. Just pointing out one or two runners that are above average height doesn’t prove anything—if anything it shows that they remarkably overcame a competitive disadvantage.

“Between 1990 and 2012 the average height of the top 100 men marathoners in a given year decreased from 5 feet 8.1 inches to 5 feet 6.9 inches”

The height of the world population is getting taller over time. If there wasn’t a competitive advantage to being shorter in distance running you wouldn’t see that trend.

Once you accept the fact that there is a disadvantage to being tall while running a marathon, the next question is why?

Here are some pretty good candidate theories:

1) extra weight = more work

2) more work = more heat

3) extra weight = higher forces on bones/ligaments and greater chance for injury during training

mortyd wrote:

The distribution of height of elite runners within their own home countries, whether USA or Kenya, isn't biased towards shorter people.

This is exactly the data that I want to look at. Just saying that statement doesn’t make it true. I think it is actually skewed toward shorter people but I don’t have hard data to prove it.

You have to do some work, but it's not that hard to do. Here's a list of US Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers. Just go down the list and do some online search for heights. You don't have to find everyone's height, just a sufficient number to see if there is a trend. I don't think you'll find it to be lower than the average American.

Trevor Hofbauer 6'3" ran 2:09:51 in Toronto last October. Only 26 seconds off Cam Levins canadian record. He doesn't look to skinny.

Someone knows his weight?

outside running wrote:

You have to do some work, but it's not that hard to do. Here's a list of US Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers. Just go down the list and do some online search for heights. You don't have to find everyone's height, just a sufficient number to see if there is a trend. I don't think you'll find it to be lower than the average American.

That's already been done with the 2004 Trials qualifiers here:

Average American OT marathoner = 5'10"

Average adult male American = 5'9"

Hardloper wrote:

outside running wrote:

You have to do some work, but it's not that hard to do. Here's a list of US Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers. Just go down the list and do some online search for heights. You don't have to find everyone's height, just a sufficient number to see if there is a trend. I don't think you'll find it to be lower than the average American.

That's already been done with the 2004 Trials qualifiers here:

Average American OT marathoner = 5'10"

Average adult male American = 5'9"

https://run-fit.com/wp-content/uploads/olympictrials.pdf

The paper says the average height of OT marathoner was 176.6 cm or 5’9” which does match the average height in population.

The average only tells part of the story. We need the actual data to see the whole picture. What about the distribution of heights? Does it follow a Gaussian curve like the population? Is the standard deviation the same as the population? I can imagine all the runners in the group being very close to 5’9” with exactly zero runners that are 6’4”. Without knowing the distribution of heights we can’t say for certain whether taller runners were less likely to make it that point.

mortyd wrote:

I can imagine all the runners in the group being very close to 5’9” with exactly zero runners that are 6’4”. Without knowing the distribution of heights we can’t say for certain whether taller runners were less likely to make it that point.

It's not zero runners in the Olympic Trials that are 6'4". Luke Puskedra, one the guys with the fastest PRs (2:10) in the field, is 6'4". You've lost all your arguments.