The Boston Athletic Association announced today that they had a record number of entries for the 2025 Boston Marathon – 36,406 qualified runners submitted their entries last week for the race next year. That beat the previous record of 33,058 runners (for this past year’s race). For the 2024 Boston Marathon, they were not able to accept 30% of the entrants due to field size constraints and now there are even more entrants! This means people are going to have to OFFICIALLY run faster in the future (“officially” because people were having to run faster anyway for the cut-off but now those times are set as standards).
Boston Marathon Running Hopefuls Will Have to Run Faster
It is amazing the progression of how runners have gotten much faster in the marathon over the years. I remember years ago, when I had first started running, that there was actually a Last Chance marathon that took place in March – to help people qualify for the Boston Marathon the next month! This was because they never filled the field with qualified runners.
But then something happened and runners started filling out the field quicker and quicker. As a result, the BAA had to start a rolling admission process for people to enter by how much faster they had run under the qualifying time. In 2013, they changed the qualifying times and those times stayed in place until 2019. For 2020, they changed the times again. The reason for this was that the cut off time was almost 5 minutes or more faster than the qualified time so it was disappointing for runners who ran a qualifying time to find out that they were still not fast enough to gain entry. So, the times kept being 5 minutes faster in the qualification changes.
With this latest registration process, the BAA realized it was time to change it up again. This may sound like disappointing news for aspiring Boston Marathon runners (including myself!) but the truth is that we would not have gotten in anyway unless we ran times faster than the new qualifying times. This is because people were submitting much faster times than the qualifying times.
So, for the 2026 Boston Marathon and on, runners in the 18-59 age groups will find that they need to run 5 minutes faster just to qualify for the registration process. Keep in mind that this will still not guarantee them entry into the famed marathon! And, in the first time since 1986, male runners between 18-34 will need to run faster than a 3 hour marathon JUST TO QUALIFY for the race! The new qualifying time is 2:55 for men 18-34.
Here is the page with all the breakdown on the new qualifying times.
My goal had been to target the 3:20 time for the Boston Marathon when I will be 45 but I guess I will need to just train a little harder – or wait until I get older! 🙂
No problem for men, enter as non-binary it seems.