Boston 2025 cutoff discussion

Specifically, how much of a cushion should I be aiming for in my Spring race to guarantee entry?

AT LEAST five minutes and almost certainly a lot more. I think we may see 6:00+.

After two straight years of 5:00+ cutoff, I expect the standards will be reduced 5:00 for the 2026 race.

This presents a problem for pacers. It is getting harder and harder for races to offer a 3:00 pacer. Many seem to start at 3:05 or 3:10. Even big races like Columbus last year did not have a 3:00 pacer; they had a 1:30 HM pacer who only took the marathoners through halfway. If it drops to 2:55, people are going to need to form their own pace groups.

The cutoff is 100% going to be greater than the 5:29 from last year, by at least a minute.

There is pent-up demand from the 11,000+ rejected 2024 BQs, economy and travel is even more on fire, there are even more BQs compared to last year (substantially more), and shoetubers have made marathon even more of the "hot thing," Boston and six world majors specifically.

I'm trying to figure out how much cushion I need to be absolutely safe. The more cushion one shoots for, the more one risks a total blow-up.

Sure. I mean, if you're trained near your max and you're trying to sort this out a handful of weeks away from your race. But last fall you knew what the cutoff was, and it would have been reasonable at that time to anticipate that it might be a tougher cut for the following year. So "the more cushion one shoots for" involves less of a chance of blowing up when planning and setting up training after recovering from a fall race.

If you decided to wait until now to contemplate that ... sorry.

I've trained to where a BQ-5 is not a hard ask, and I knew that the cutoff would be greater, so my max fitness is significantly better than that. I didn't wait until now to contemplate it, I'm zeroing on a goal. It's a question of how hard I push. BQ-15 is probably doable but would increase blow-up risk. I feel like somewhere in between is the right answer.

I doubt it will be more than -10. Probably -6 to -7, but that is wild speculation this far in advance. So if you feel comfortable with -10, that’s good. do that. And if you are even thinking that-15 is an outside possibility, then going through most of your race for a -10 means you can probably finish close to -12.

Pre Boston 2024 bump
what kind of cushion should we hobby jogger Olympians be shooting for

If the weather is good and there is a tailwind on Monday, it will result in a lot of qualifiers. We are already on record pace for qualifiers. There were 5,000+ more qualifiers at Chicago/NYC than last year.

Good weather + tailwind = you better aim for 10:00 under your time to be safe. I think the cutoff will be worse than the 7:47 it was for the Covid-shrunken 2021 race.

findmymarathon.com

2025 Boston Marathon Qualifiers

View the number of runners who have qualified for the 2025 Boston Marathon in eligible races and compare those numbers with the number and percentage of runners who qualified for the 2024 Boston Marathon.

Link:findmymarathon.com/bostonmarathonquali...

Yes I am thinking 10 minutes cushion. 2026 they’re gonna lower standards by 5 min for sure

Yeah, the most the will expand is go from the lower end they took this year (it was under 23K) to 24K (which is what they took quite a few times pre-pandemic). Unfortunately, that equates to maybe a minute of cutoff. It's marginal unless they explode the field to 30K (which they won't for a number of reasons)

They could also reduce the number of invitational bibs, I think it’s less likely that they would reduce the number of charity bibs, but there are definitely some sketchy invitational type things that they could cut down on. but you’re right that the limitations of working with the cities and the narrow streets means that they really can’t add many more runners, so it’s a more question of how much the applications are going to increase. That article predicted between seven and eight minutes, but I think it will be more like 10 minutes.

Think that it underestimates the worst case because we are trending toward greater than 30% increase in BQ’s, his worst case, suggesting greater than 30% increase in applications proportionally, and it doesn’t count for increased international interest. 10 minutes.

Realistically it's almost entirely dependent on the weather at the big races every year. Either way I doubt it's much more than this year unless we end up with a huge tailwind at Boston this year.

Ove 9 minutes. Faster shoes plus a lot of people running.

>10 mins.

Ok, guesses have ranged from around the same as last year (5:29, which seems like wishful thinking at this point) to >10 minutes. I’m gonna shoot for 10 and some change. And there’s always a last chance downhill cheater course to get a BQ-30 if all else fails /s

Obviously the further under the standard the better. Let's say you're standard is 3:00. When I trained to qualify for 2024 boston marathon, my mindset was I don't want it to even be a question of if I got in or not. My goal was to do everything I could to be 10 minutes under the standard because in my mind they would never cut that far without changing the standards first. If something went wrong or if I was slightly behind my goal, at least had a decent cushion to work with

Now that might not be a possibility for a lot of people. But I wouldn't bank on cutoffs being less than the prior year's cutoff. It's certainly happened, but I think the 5:29 cut off was a wake up call for a lot of people since the previous two bostons had no cutoff. And at the time, lots of people thought a 7-8 minute cutoff was coming due to the number of applicants.

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