For perspective I'll give you a little history about my BQ quest. My first BQ attempt resulted in a BQ - 48sec and an injury. Actually the injury cropped up 5 weeks out from my goal race and my training fell apart as I tried various breaks from running to try to let the injury heal. After the race the injury persisted until I saw an orthopedic, took 2 months off of running, and did PT during the those 2 months. As a part of this I found out that I have the beginning of osteoarthritis in my hip as well as a torn labrum. With that in mind I decided on 2 things. The first is that I wanted to BQ on my next attempt and be far enough below the qualifying time to leave no doubt that I would be accepted. The other is that I decided to favor quality over quantity in my running since I only have so many running miles left in my hips. I did the quality over quantity thing plus cross training for about 10 months rebuilding my base. I then chose a spring marathon in 2018 for my BQ race and a training plan that I thought would get me in shape to get a good time. I found my goals for this marathon were a bit of a moving target as fitness improved. My initial goal was BQ - 10min with a fallback of BQ - 5min to guarantee acceptance. My BQ time for that year was 3:30 and my race result was 3:03 getting me a BQ - 27min. Achievement unlocked but it took time and hard work for me to get there.
I have read some of the threads discussing BQ times and every time I see someone that makes a comment suggesting changes that BAA could make it more fair I start to wonder if these people take their BQ goal seriously and do they train like they mean it. I saw your handle show up in one of those threads and so I got curious so a couple of weeks ago I went through the previous RR&T threads to see what you were doing for your training. Thank goodness for the link back the previous week's thread because that made it really easy to find your previous posts. I have a shorthand summary of each week and will have a follow up post with that summary and with some ideas on how you could improve things. That's at home and will have to wait till the evening for me to post that follow up. Note that your training for Baystate was better than my first BQ attempt.