Boston Marathon Debate

Ralphy wrote:What does the uninvolved public "get" from their displacement during a Gay Rights Rally or KKK Rally or some other road closing? Road closings for demonstrations/parades happen all the time and what does the "uninvolved public" get? Why is a marathon any different. F! the charities, that's not the purpose of a marathon.

Your rallies and parades don't close 26.2 miles of road for several hours. Huge difference.

If you read through the multiple articles about this you'll see a good chunk of the so called "charity" slots go to sponsors or other supporting organizations. No race director if going to go to sponsors and say "there's a bunch of guys whining on message boards, so I'm cutting your 1000 slots to 500".

The fact is there always has been non-qualifiers and there always will be. It's what makes the marathon work. Any recommendation that includes the phrase "kick out all the non-qualifiers" is a non-starter with BAA so there's no point even discussing it.

I'm sure there's goodly number of those slots that could be pulled back, tour operators operators come to mind, but even if you cut them in half that really only means registration would have been open maybe another 45 minutes.

The idea of A and B standards is intriguing. However I see a major logistical problem for BAA. How do you police the standards? Today there's one standard and if your documentation isn't correct you're bumped and there's plenty of time to bump you. If you have a 2:50 A standard and the same as today as a B standard there needs to be enough time between the two registration periods to vet them, or you simply say if you lie about your time to get the "A" standard you're out of luck (my preference). You know people that got the "B" time will put on their online entry an "A" time just to get registered.

I see this first hand on a race I do, we hold slots open for club members and folks will say they are on the online system when the "open" slots fill. I can imagine the hassle of dealing with that for a race with 20,000 people.

I think the most practical solution is to lower the standards based on looking at the qualified pool. Look at some form of curve and drop the standards to a point people would be assured of entry, then maybe 60 or 90 days before the event open the remaining slots to a wait list.

Old timers will tell you Boston is not the same event that they used to run. Before they didn't hand out water every mile and people were fine with that. It wasn't all about money and wanting to give runners everything they want now.

The corporate feel to it and the charity and sponsor numbers have changed the vibe of the event. The race organizers know they have to pull back on the numbers they give to non-qualified runners.

Suppose they pull back the number from 5700 ish to 2700. Then they have to allocate the number of spots left. 20% of runners not qualifying is too many if Boston wants to honor its history.

Cut qualifying standards based upon past data.

Stop allowing runners to use the same marathon qualifying time to run Boston two different years.

Also allow runners to get a refund if they register and get injured. This would open up spots. If it isn't full with the new qualifying standards and the race wants to fill it up based upon its need for revenue, they could run an lottery of people who have run the current qualifying standards today.

It is pretty simple.

That's what old timers always do - rattle on about how great it was back in the good ole days.

Read my history book about the marathon and how in 1977 Jerome Drayton complained about the lack of water on the course while he was winning the race! He shouted at the press truck. The old days were not so good. Much has been improved.

Tom

nope to dope wrote:

20% of runners not qualifying is too many if Boston wants to honor its history.

You mean if Boston wants to honor your fantasy.

Thats retarded logic. No other race I've run on public roads is so concerned about providing charity to "soften the blow". the 127 million dollars the event generates should soften the blow. No one baseball game does that and you'll never get a superbowl so this is the best sporting event your city can hope for. And since the the BAA is sitting on $800 mil, it ought to lose its non-profit status like the Girl Scouts.

Derderian wrote:

A big difference between a major league baseball game and the marathon is that the baseball game is played in a private park but a marathon is run on public roads. The uninvolved public has to get something from their displacement from the roads. That's the problem. The charity benefit softens the use of public property for even a non-profit corporation.

Tom

What has changed, regarding the "uninvolved public," since the advent of involvement by John Hancock and its charities?

I agree that much has been improved but much has changed and not everything has changed for the better. The feel of the event is different. From the expo where adidas now is the only place you can buy Boston Marathon merchandise to the Biggest Loser Contestants running it last year while knowing one of my friends who worked hard and ran a much faster time than the qualifying time was shut out.

Any of the towns, Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, Newton, Brookline, or Boston could shut down the marathon by denying a permit. Patriots day is less of a holiday than it used to be so people are going to work on Monday and don't want to be delayed. The marathon splits the towns down the middle like a meat cleaver. They have to position police and fire services on both sides of the road. It costs them. The towns have to schedule road and utility repairs on other days. Imagine an open manhole!

All that stuff is expensive so the towns have to be persuaded to allow the marathon to pass.

It is a negotiation. I doubt if it is perfect but it is necessary.

Tom

So how is all of that different prior to the first year of John Hancock's involvement? Are you implying that none of that was the case previously?

I don't know how the feelings and expectations of the town's people changed over the years but the race gradually became more of an imposition. For the first time in 1969 more than a thousand ran. In subsequent years the field size grew and with the offer of prize money when Hancock came in the mid eighties, maybe the people in the towns began to want to tap into an ever larger volume of the revenue stream as at various years at various rates public and civic organizations became less inclined to donate their services to a race that became bigger, lasted longer, and raised money for other organizations as well as paid the top runners as it became more expensive for the towns.

I personally have an entry blank from 1968 that has no mention of an entry fee to the Boston Marathon but only the requirement of $2 AAU membership. Maybe the police did not mind donating their services for an amateur event. But now it is professional.

I suspect that the towns began to think that if people pay to run and people get paid, then the towns deserve to have their expenses paid too.

Tom

Boston didn't even have qualifying times until 1970, and at that time it was 4 hours, then it was lowered to 3:30. This wasn't to make it an elite event only, it was a practical measure to control the field's size.

If you take away the "corporate feel" Boston as a marathon is dead. Back in the 80's when the limit was 2:50 there was no prize money, and the real elites ran everywhere else. For the marathon to survive it had to move out of amateur status and start offering prize money, and that meant sponsors, and sponsors want participation. Sitting on their thumbs trying to be an amateur hobby-jogger's wet dream would have doomed the marathon. Take away the prize money and appearance fees and you have a winning time around 2:20. That's when the marathon starts to lose it's prestige.

It's never going to be that Boston of the 70's or 80's and quite frankly why would you really want it to be? Sure, you could claim it's more manly to run without water, fine, don't take any. Hell, maybe they should go back to the original days when they handed out brandy from bicycles. Ever watched the video of the Duel in the Sun? Do you really want to go back to a race with crowd control so poor the leaders practically needed motorcycles to act as blockers?

The Boston marathon's "history" is that is has one, not merely the fact that very late in it's history it instituted time standards. If it is to stay a major marathon it needs to act like one. That means prize money and appearance fees, and the methods to pay for them.

Seems to me a lottery is the solution.

Absolutely.

Boston would be best served by taking the entry fees up and up, not by tinkering with qualifying times or qualifying windows or anything else. If there is high demand for your product or service then you're stupid to not make the price correspondingly high.

I'd hate to see a bunch of people priced out of Boston, or see it go to a lottery similar to New York. Clearly it's not realistic to stage the event like in 1980, to kick out all the non-qualifiers, or kick out the corporate sponsors.

Some combination of pruning the non-qualifiers, tuning the qualifying times based on demographic performance, and changing the cost structure for both qualifiers and non-qualifiers should bracket in on a solution.

Boston isn't some small entity run by Jock Semple anymore. Even if you could dig him up and jump start him those days are gone. Some huge radical change just isn't in the character of the event or the organization putting it on. Proposing (or expecting) that is the final solution isn't going to give anyone satisfaction.

I've been dipping into the eggnog early and have a few modest proposals.

1. The lottery would be more fun if Dave McGillivray went up in a hot air balloon on race day and dropped a limited number of official race bibs. You catch one; you run.

2. Shut down both lanes of the Mass Pike and run 500,000 people to Boston like cattle.

3. Sell a fixed number of official entries like an IPO on an announced day and allow the price to fluctuate on an official exchange. Then they could be traded so the price of a Boston Marathon Number would be reported next to the DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P 500. "The BMN rose $3 today on news that the GDP rose .2% higher than predicted."

Merry Christmas,

Tom

Derderian wrote:

I've been dipping into the eggnog early and have a few modest proposals.

Merry Christmas,

Tom

Always good ideas Tom. Need to get on that eggnog myself. Time to start the grill.

Merry Christmas to you too.

I DON'T CARE about this debate. All I CARE ABOUT is that my 3:43 time is good to qualify for 2012! Many runners complained that I should not use the 18 month rule as a crutch to get into Boston. Truthfully, I don't think I have a 3:40 in me.

Keep the standards the same, thank you!

People are already priced out of Boston, as it is. Nobody's crying for them. So it doesn't matter a bit if more are added to that existing reality.