Readers who submit an entry into our Guess the 2019 Boston Marathon Cutoff contest are invited to submit the reasoning behind their entry for publication. (Have you entered yet?) Every September, when registration for the Boston Marathon opens up, a significant number of potential runners have to wait anxiously to see whether their mBQ
The prospect of a sub-2-hour marathon continues to excite running fans, and possibly even more so sports physiologists. The latest paper on this topic, How Much Further For The Sub-Two-Hour Marathon?, has just been published by the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine. Written by scientists from Brazil, Greece, and Switzerland, the paper explores the
0 The track, around which you run endlessly only to have gone nowhere. 0.16 Seconds by which Usain Bolt lowered the world record at 100m. 1 The first-person: I. The will, the self, the subject of the experience of all those miles all those miles all those mornings all those trails all those
Last month when Roger Bannister died, I, like most of the running world, got thinking about his first sub four-minute mile. I knew that he had run it in Oxford, and since I happened to have an old map of that “City of Dreaming Spires” I looked for the Iffley Road Track (now re-named the
In Sunday’s London Marathon, both Eliud Kipchoge and Mary Keitany ran considerably faster than world-record pace for the first half of the distance. In fact, both set records for the fastest first 13.1 miles in a marathon. However, both fell far short of setting new records for 26.2. Indeed, Keitany blew up bigtime, running
Eliud Kipchoge, an Olympic gold medalist marathoner from Kenya, is the world’s fastest runner. On 26 September 2018, he ran a time of 2:01:39 at the Berlin Marathon in Germany. This was his third consecutive win at this event and it broke the previous record for a marathon by more than 1 minute. Since finishing
Some numbers: Desiree Linden’s winning margin of 4:10 is the largest since 1993. Her time of 2:39:54 beat the second-place time of 2:44:04 by Sarah Sellers by 4:10. In 1993, Olga Markova’s 2:25:27 was 4:33 faster than Kim Jones’ 2:30:00. Desi’s was the slowest winning time for women since Gayle Barron in 1978 (2:44:52) Yuki
1: The number of times I have dropped out of a marathon in 155 starts. I dropped out of the first one, and have since finished 154 in a row. 5: My children, the most important part of my life 7: The number of marathons I ran this January (2018) in 7 days
The Boston Marathon is one of the few races that require most runners to beat a qualifying time to get in. Some runners do that on their first attempt, while others struggle for years, hoping that hard work and slower qualifying times for older runners will help them succeed. Boston Marathon qualifying (BQ) times for
Let’s take a look at a chart of the winning times in the Boston Marathon for the Open and Wheelchair divisions: Note how as fields get larger and more experienced, much of the variability from year to year goes away. The trends match the trends for the marathon community as a whole, represented below