QOTD: I believe this was already mentioned last week, but BAA is lowering the qualifying times by 5 minutes across the board for the 2020 marathon. For those who have Boston as a goal, does this change your plans any?
No change for me. I've known since I started out that it was going to take a best case scenario for me to qualify. After 6 years, 10,000 miles, and dropping my PR from 4:50 to 3:14, I'm close, but still not there yet. I've always planned on running the BQ at -5 min, so really nothing changes for me. And come race day, I'm not necessarily chasing a certain time. I'm chasing my best race on that day given the circumstances whatever that may be. They did have a now mostly forgotten rule back in 2011 and earlier before entries outnumbered spots available. While the BQ was X, you were allowed to submit an entry with a time of X+59 seconds. And if there was enough room, you got in. So a 3:50 standard, could actually be written as 3:50:59. But I wasn't able to find that language written in the new qualifying standards in a cursory look.
I was surprised they did decide to do an age wide drop at 5 min until I looked closer at the data. Back in 1990-2002, they moved the standards to be more age graded to make an equitable field for chances to get in. They used data to support that a 3:10 for M 18-24 was as hard as a M 40-44 at 3:20 at that time and for the spots available. But in 2003, they changed the standards solely because they wanted to increase the field size. So the change that happened in 2003 wasn't stated as being for equitable purposes, but was because they were trying to get more entrants. That's when the 40-59 age groups got their +5 min bump to easier qualifying standards. In 2012, right before the running boom, is when they changed the standards to be what were the standards up until just now. The 2012 change was again based on a statistical analysis (
link) of marathon times in a significant number of races across the world. The data showed that the current difference between M and F qualifying times was equitable and any change should be given to the F (but less than 2 min). So it was determined not to change M/F standard differences. But you can tell based on Table 2 and 3 that the standards for the 45-59 age group are still easier than 44 or less given the roughly 12% of BQ times vs the 8% of BQ times. But running through the numbers on 2018 Boston entries tells the story as to why they couldn't just change the standards for 44-59 age groups (
link). Using some back of the napkin calculations based on the number of runners in 45-59 age groups and then adjusting for an 8% population instead of 12% population (a rough calculation based on a lack of data but supported by when I did a review some time back (
link)), there would have only been a reduction of about 3650 runners. So not enough given the 7200 denied entries in 2019. Reducing everyone by 5 min, means a much more significant cut (about 4000 runners from just the 18-39 age group + 1500 runners from 40-44 and 3650 runners from 45-59 = ~9150 runners dropped). So this 5 min across the board makes things better for number of entries. Thus, you can see if they made the change to -5min for 18-44 and -10min for 45-59, it would have reduced their field size by too much (~10,062). So while not equitable, it was the easier decision based on number of applicants, field size, and BQ standards for different age groups. If they were willing to change by increments other than 5 min, then it could make it more equitable, but that just seems messy and unnecessary at this time.
