Boston Marathon Mix of Gender by Age Group for City of Boston Runners

By Raymond Britt

About 30,000 runners are entered in the 2018 Boston Marathon. In our analysis of the top 25 cities by number of runners, Boston leads with 749. While the gender mix across all 30,000 entrants is 55% men, 45% women, we were surprised to find the in Boston, 59% are women. In fact, the Female 25-29 age group has twice as many entrants as any other age group in Boston.

To see data on runners by age group and 7,579 cities see our Global City Data Table

For more comprehensive coverage see www.RaceBoston.com.

Boston Marathon 2016 Results Analysis: Overall Avg Finishers and Times, by Gender, by Age Group, by Starting Waves and vs Prior Years

By Raymond Britt

Our Exclusive Coverage of the 2016 Boston Marathon Results and Analysis

For more, visit our complete multi-year, multi-dimension analysis at www.RaceBoston.com.

Meb Keflezighi's Amazing Boston Marathon Victory: Why Did Other Exceptional Runners Lose?

By Raymond Britt

Boston Marathon 2014: One of the Greatest Marathon Victories of All Time?

Image by Raymond Britt

Meb Keflezighi's Boston Marathon win has been called 'a Run for the Ages' and some have even called it one of the greatest marathon performances of all time. Meb ran the best race of his life, and that's saying a lot. He was steady, ran his planned race without hesitation, delivering the fastest marathon time in an outstanding career that's included winning the 2009 New York City Marathon and earning a gutsy come-from behind Bronze medal at the Olympic Games.

I have tremendous respect for Meb, Ryan Hall, and all the monumentally impressive top 20 elites who came to race Boston this year. This was an emotional marathon, a year after terrorism shattered the race, and Boston 2014 was the year we were going to take the race back. And nothing would be more perfect than for an American to win for the first time since 1968.

Boston's 32,000 runners and up to one million spectators did indeed take the marathon back, and Meb's victory was the type that legends are made of. A storybook ending, absolutely classic, almost an impossible outcome. As a veteran of 13 consecutive Boston Marathons, and now a reporter/photographer covering the race, I'm thrilled with the result. Boston is legendary. For me Boston is personal. It's the greatest marathon in the world.

Boston Marathon 2014: One of the More Stunning Losing Performances of All Time?

Wall Street Journal 5/2/14 Featuring RunTri.com Analysis

However . . . As an endurance racing statistician who's analyzed hundreds of races in detail, and as a journalist who's been present to witness some of the other, great, defining marathon performances in history at Chicago Marathon, New York City Marathon and US Olympic Trials, the numbers or explanations surrounding the American's victory or the Kenyans' and Ethiopians' poor performances just didn't add up.

We dove deep into the numbers of the elite runners, comparing PRs vs Boston finish times, mapping Top 10 Runners at every checkpoint, and specifically analyzing the top 3 finishers, including Chebet, who had charged to close the gap to 8 seconds from Meb before it stunningly all fell apart.

We shared our analysis and questions with Kevin Helliker and Sharon Terlep of the Wall Street Journal, who included it in their article 'Boston Marathon Mysters: Why Didn't Anyone Beat Meb?'

Here are the questions we posed, and our resulting analysis.

Of 17 elites coming into the race with, for the most part, dramatically faster PRs than Meb, why did many of them deliver shockingly poor performances?

Why did 4 of the fastest marathoners in the world, including the defending champion, drop out of the race before finishing? What are the odds?

So close, but too tired? Chebet came back with a tremendous surge, only, in his agent's word, to become too 'tired' to reel Meb in at the end. 

Boston Marathon: Predicting Your Finishing Time After Running the First 13.1 Miles

Around the time Boston Marathon runners reach the half-way point in Wellesley, the question on most runners' minds is: What might my finish time likely to be?

How can runners predict a finish time halfway through the race?

The short answer, after analyzing thousands of finishers splits over the years: multiple your 13.1 mile time by 2.1. Cross the half-way point in 1:30, you could finish in 3:09, for example.

But first, note that statistically, the 2.1 multiplier is a decent guide. But it won't hold for those who started too fast, or finished with extra energy left over.

The blue dots in this chart plot the intersection of first and second half splits for each Boston Marathon 2013 finisher. The cluster around the yellow trend line hold reasonably true to the finish multiplier of 2.1 times half-marathon split. But you can also see a great many runners who blew up in the second half of the race, shown in the general upper left area



Of course there are variances, and I've got answers for you, by age gender, age group and by 30 minute finish time increments for all who finished under 4:30 in 2013. See age group details below.

[Competitor Magazine (www.competitor.com) has published our analysis of more than 17,000 finishers at Boston Marathon 2013 to provide some guidance. Click this link for the full article. Below are some of the charts contained in the piece.]

For more, see our complete Boston Marathon Race Coverage.

Boston Marathon Entrants and Finishers Results Analysis From 1897 to Present

At the first Boston Marathon in 1897, 18 runners entered the race, 15 showed up at the starting line to actually run the race, and 10 finished the entire marathon. Since then, more than 550,000 athletes have been granted or earned entry into the legendary Boston Marathon. 

Women were granted official entry more than 40 years ago, and between 1975 (earliest official women's finisher counts) and 2013, 443,000 have finished Boston. (Personally, I've finished 13 consecutive times, and apparently only 350 or so have accomplished that feat).

In recent years, it's been pretty simple: 22,000 qualifiers enter the race and 5,000 charity runners also participate, for a total of 27,000 entrants.

The devious and destructive terrorist bombings that suspended the 2013 Boston Marathon brought about several changes to the 2014 race entry procedure. But exceptional interest and demand to enter Boston Marathon 2014 led to a fairly convoluted process to allow 36,000 entrants, possibly for this year only. 

We've analyzed Boston Marathon entry and finisher data since 1897, with a particular focus on the era since the mid 1970s, and to fairly excruciating detail about the composition of Boston 2014 entrants. All are presented below. 

For much, much more, visit out comprehensive Boston Marathon Coverage for Advice, Details about Qualifying for Boston, Extremely detailed analysis of races since 2000, photos and more.

Unfinished Business in Boston: Projecting Non-Finishers' Finish Times

By Raymond Britt

It's about time. Literally. It's about declaring projected finish times for the thousands of Boston Marathon runners who were not allowed to finish after the terrible tragedy suspended the race.

Three weeks have passed since the tragedy, and yet there is no resolution for those thousands who have every right to declare themselves Boston Finishers, given the circumstances of the day. Time for closure. Time to define your projected finish time. The BAA's resolution isn't ready yet, which is reasonable, given the myriad of other issues they face.

Until then, it's time to step up with projected finish times, and we've taken on the assignment (unofficially). We ran the numbers, slicing and dicing the data every which way (see notes on Methodology, below), and after hours and hours of detailed analysis, I'll get to the punchline.

Projecting Your Boston Marathon 2013 Finish Time

What might your finish time have been?  It may be as simple as this:

• If you were stopped after 35k, your effective finish time may = 35k time multiplied by 1.23
• If you had crossed the 40k, your effective finish time could =  40k time multiplied by 1.06

Is this 100% accurate? No. But I'd expect our projected results will be within a minute or two in a wide majority of the cases.

But: One exception will be the runners who went out too fast, too early, and had hit the wall, slowing to a crawl. See our Correlation Between First and Second Half Split Times to gauge if you fit in that group.

Will the BAA's resolution be different? It very well could be. We don't know what direction they will go. But one thing is clear: our analysis here is unofficial; BAA's will be the official resolution. 

Methodology

Background: our perspective on this topic comes from several dimensions. We know the course intimately; 13 consecutive Boston finishes. We've been presenting in-depth coverage of the Boston Marathon for years, see www.RaceBoston.com. We've developed and posted dozens of analytics and diagnostics about Boston; see our Stats/Results/Analysis archive for more than 200 posts analyzing top marathon and triathlon events. We're not new to projecting finish times based on incomplete data; see many examples in our Race Statistics/Results Analysis archives. Most recently, we projected finish times of the new Ironman 70.3 St. George within 1% of actual.]

We noted the multipliers above were 'deceptively simple' because it took a great deal of work to confidently calculate the appropriate value. 

Our approach is illustrated in an example of our analysis of all Illinois finishers in the 50-54 age group. This included 53 men, 19 women. We did extensive analysis of this sampling of runners, tabulating their 5k splits from start to finish, comparing an contrasting splits from sub-3 hour finishers to 4+ hour runners, from Boston re-qualifiers to those who, well, didn't come close to requalifying. 

See data below, from drill-down detail for each finisher, up to average splits as a percent of total, which we used to calculate the 35k and 40k multipliers.

Male Finishers Aged 50-54 from Illinois

Female Finishers Aged 50-54 from Illinois

For more on our extensive Boston Marathon analysis, see our Complete Boston Marathon Coverage. For even more, see our archive of 200+ Race Stats/Results Analysis posts 

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Boston Marathon: How Much Harder is it to Run a Qualifying Time?

In response to increasingly overwhelming demand to enter the Boston Marathon, the Boston Athletic Association revised qualifying times, lowering the standard by 5 minutes for all age groups hoping to race in 2013.


The immediate question on the minds of those with hopes for qualifying for Boston was: what will be the impact on the number of runners who meet the new qualifying limits?

The short answer: the percent fell from 13% in 2011 to 8% in 2012. The trends between 2003 and 2013:

• 2003 to 2005: 7% to 8%
• 2006 to 2007: 11%
• 2008 to 2011: 12% to 13%
• 2012 to 2013 (new 5-minute faster time): 8%

The major change between 2011 and 2013 did not diminish demand to enter Boston.

Those who ran qualifying times in 2013, 3,000 were turned away, and the actual times accepted runners ran was 1 minute, 38 seconds or faster than the standard.

We've run the numbers for the last 11 years, overall and by the largest marathons, to determine the change in number of athletes running qualifying times over the years.