When Boston Marathon registration was shut down today (Monday) at 4:03 p.m. CDT, it was unprecedented and left a lot of Boston qualifiers stunned and very disappointed.
Last year, registation was open for more than two months. This year, it was just over eight hours with some technical difficulties early in the morning adding to the anxious day at the keyboard. Marathon executive director Guy Morse says everything will be on the table next year, including tighter qualifying standards. Believe me, Guy Morse is a guy who does not like the idea that qualifiers are not getting into the Boston Marathon. He will work to come up with a solution for 2012. What it is, we can only guess as the 2011 race goes ahead under the current rules and qualifying standards. So you're a good runner who has the qualifying time, but you're not entered. What do you do? There are other marathons, and I've already suggested London, Paris and Rotterdam to one good friend. Stay tuned. This is quite a story. You have my total sympathy if you didn't get in. As one writer put it, runners with fast feet but slow fingers on the keyboard, were out of luck today. When I first ran Boston in 1990, there were 6,000 runners. My, how time has changed.
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3 comments:
Oh man, I have a co-worker who qualified recently, hope he made it.
A lot of people who thought they were running Boston in 2011 won't be there. It's a stunning development in running.
I hope that the BAA finally begins excluding the increasingly commonplace practice of 'banditing' Boston (of which over 6,000 were estimated to have run the course in 2010), since that simple and obvious step would allow the BAA to partially address the growing supply-demand imbalance by increasing bibs by that same number. Along with necessarily tightening somewhat the qualifying times the BAA could restore some semblance of order to their 2012 registration, without a lottery system which would degrade the Boston to just another marathon. We'll see!
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