The Boston Athletic Association (BAA) sets the Boston Qualifying (BQ) times for each age group. For my age range of 45 to 49, the time was 3:20.

When the BAA decided who to accept as Boston Qualifiers for 2024, too many runners had qualified.

So, in all their wisdom, the BAA recalculated the qualifying times based on the surge in qualifiers. This adjustment was meant to keep the field at about 22,000 runners. The other 8,000 or so entries come from charity spots, corporate sponsors, and other categories (I’m estimating here—you can look up the exact breakdown).

I don’t know the exact formula they used, but they subtracted about 5 minutes and 30 seconds from each age group’s time. This didn’t change the official published qualifying standards for future years, but it did apply to the April 2024 race.

In September 2023, just a month before I was set to run Chicago, I found out I had been pushed out of qualifying for Boston by about 2 minutes.

If you’ve read my Chicago Marathon Series, you’ll know I earned a BQ at the 2022 Amsterdam Marathon, which I ran in October 2022. My time was 3:16:20—under the official 3:20 standard for my age group. But after waiting nearly a year for the 2024 cutoff announcement in September 2023, I learned the adjusted standard was now 5:30 faster than the posted time. My Amsterdam BQ missed the new cutoff by almost 2 minutes. Too many people had qualified, and the BAA had to trim the field across all age groups—including mine.

When I ran Chicago, my assumption was that I’d need about a 10-minute buffer from the 3:20 qualifying time to feel safe. I suspected that if even more people qualified, the BAA might subtract even more from each age group’s standard. I finished Chicago in 3:12:20.

And then, just like with Amsterdam, I had to again wait 11 months, to find out if it would be enough for the 2025 Boston Marathon. Sure enough, too many runners qualified again, and the BAA lowered the cutoff even further.

The new adjustment was 6 minutes and 51 seconds faster than the official standard. That meant for my age group’s 3:20 standard, the real cutoff was now 3:13:09.

With a sigh of relief, and after two years of waiting, if you count from Amsterdam, I made it by a whopping 49 seconds!

Google AI’s short explanation:
For the 2025 Boston Marathon, the “cutoff time” was 6 minutes and 51 seconds faster than the published qualifying times. This meant runners had to run at least 6:51 faster than their standard to secure a spot. The stricter cutoff was necessary because over 36,000 qualified runners applied for entry.