Top 50 Best Races to Qualify for Boston

Fifty races, 300,000+ finishers, 42,000+ Boston Qualifiers -- here's our list of the Top 50 Best Marathons for runners who want to Qualify for Boston. Also see our Marathon Training and Racing section, and our complete coverage of Chicago, Boston and New York City marathons.

To see the qualifying times you'll be shooting for, visit our Qualifying for Boston analysis.

To put these top 50 races in perspective, here are excerpts from RunTri's extensive marathon analysis and race coverage, to help you on your journey to Boston. Click on title links for further analysis/discussion behind each chart.

RunTri's 25 Toughest/Easiest Marathons

Race Pace Examples: How to Qualify for Boston at Chicago Marathon

Predicting your full marathon time based on your best half marathon: Marine Corps Marathon example.

Average finish times by Age Group: New York Marathon example.

Average finish time by Age, year-by-year: PF Chang's Arizona Marathon example.

Impact of Weather on Average Race Results: Boston Marathon Example.

And more . . . www.RunTri.com home page.

Running and Race Pace Calculator Google Search Trends

Analysis by Raymond Britt

According to www.RunningUSA.com 16.957 million athletes ran and finished running races in 2017. A large portion of these runners are concerned with running pace to some degree. For preparation, many want to know how fast to run while training for a certain race. For those lining up for that big race, many want to know what pace they should run to meet or beat a target finish time.

There are a tremendous number of searches related to running on google, and we were curious: what are the most popular terms. Below, we present google's results for these five search terms, tracked over a five-year period.

• running pace
• run pace
• race pace
• pace time
• 5k pace

Search Term Interest Over Five Year Period

Each of five lines are color coded by search term, and the popularity of each term relative to the others is indicated by placement of the lines. Note that 'running pace'. far and away the most popular search five years ago, has declined as '5k pace' and 'pace time' are increasingly popular search terms.

Boston Marathon 2018 Faster than 2017 Race Despite Weather; Women Make it Happen

By Raymond Britt and RunTriMedia

Terrible weather conditions decimated field of elite runners, winning times were slowest in memory, and the remaining 26000+ runners suffered stride by stride through wind rain and cold.

But, in a remarkable surprise, when we ran the numbers for all finishers, we found the average finish time in 2018 was 3:57, a minute (52 seconds to be precise) faster than  3:58 in 2017. By comparison, the average finish time for all races in all conditions from 2000-2018 is 3:54.