Hope the cut off us 3:00 min or so my running buddy can get in. He go the mark before but was screwed by the cut off in 2019. He's been trying for years and finally got a nice 3:55 cushion, which seemed like a lock after two straight years of no cutoff. I'm guess there's a lot of people right under the qualifying mark and we won't have a huge cutoff.
I wonder what the dynamics are that generated the big increase in qualifyers? Supershoes? Pent-up covid demand that hadn't yet unwound?
I'm too lazy to look this up myself - but wasn't the weather at Boston 2023 nice, with a huge percentage of that race re-qualifying for 2024? That's enough to affect the next year's cutoff. I'm still recovering from 2018 when we ran into the wind the whole way, in freezing rain...
I wonder what the dynamics are that generated the big increase in qualifyers? Supershoes? Pent-up covid demand that hadn't yet unwound?
I'm too lazy to look this up myself - but wasn't the weather at Boston 2023 nice, with a huge percentage of that race re-qualifying for 2024? That's enough to affect the next year's cutoff. I'm still recovering from 2018 when we ran into the wind the whole way, in freezing rain...
Yep. I think a lot of the surviving beasts of 2018 are just now re-hitting the pavement. It made me re-think the BM for about a year.
I wonder what the dynamics are that generated the big increase in qualifyers? Supershoes? Pent-up covid demand that hadn't yet unwound?
I'm too lazy to look this up myself - but wasn't the weather at Boston 2023 nice, with a huge percentage of that race re-qualifying for 2024? That's enough to affect the next year's cutoff. I'm still recovering from 2018 when we ran into the wind the whole way, in freezing rain...
Yes the weather was very good. It was the fastest marathon in recent memory. This is abundantly obvious in the results.
In 2023 4188 athletes broke 3:00 compared to only 3291 in 2022 when the weather was widely perceived to be excellent(it was very nice for running). For reference, in 2018(monster storm) only 1800 broke 3:00.
Many that ran 2023 strongly disagree because it was rainy with some wind. It was cold and wet. But I was there too, and having run it many times myself I can say it was the best performance weather I've seen in Boston.