So when I see stuff like "irrevocable, sublicensable" rights to all of my running data...that's a lot to give up for a company and product I know very little about.
Capping your liability at $50 total for any harm and doing as much as you can to try and get me to lose access to legal protections such as class action and a jury trial is all a bit much.
We understand how personal user fitness data is, which is why we’ve tried our best to leave data in the control of the users. A first step was to make sure that users actually see the ToS, and we require all users to scroll through them and accept before they link any data with us. But honestly, we know the ToS is daunting for many users, which is why we give clear switches for users to revoke our access to using their data (both for model training and for using their anonymized stats in aggregated statistics); we respect the user’s decision to revoke our access in these ways, even though our ToS doesn’t require us to. Your fitness data gets immediately deleted when you delete your account; we also allow specific sources (e.g., Garmin) to get deleted without deleting your entire account.
But we agree with you–the ToS are too aggressive. For context, we had them drafted by a well-respected firm in the Bay Area. As a startup, we didn’t have the budget to carefully, line-by-line, draft terms that perfectly fit our site. Instead, we gave the firm some ToS from large companies like Strava and Garmin, and asked them if they can draft something similar. We wanted to ensure that we were legally allowed to glean insights from the fitness data of our users, and when we read the terms, it looked like it provided that, which is why we approved it. We aren’t lawyers, so we didn’t understand the ramifications of the legalese, and we’ll make sure to emphasize that we respect the user’s decision to remove our access when we re-draft them. We’ll shop around again for other firms that specialize in this area.
There's a limit on how many people can run the Boston Marathon.
To qualify to "run Boston", you have to run another marathon in a qualifying time[1], prior to applying. For example, the qualifying time for a male 40-44 is 3h05m. For a female of the same age, 3h35. Non-binary, 3h35.
You submit your application and qualifying race and time, and then some time _later_, based on the number applications received that are within the cutoff (and it's always more than they can accept), they adjust the cutoff time downwards even further. That additional cutoff delta is the what's being calculated on the slider here. So if your published cutoff is 3h05, and the slider predicts a 6min delta, you need to have run 2h59, not 3h05.
I am not a marathoner, but I'd imagine that a 6 min decrease from the stated qualifying time cuts out a larger proportion of younger runners (i.e. decreasing the threshold from 2h55 to 2h49 for men 18-34 seems like a much sharper cut than decreasing 4h20 to 4h14 for women 60-64). I would have thought you'd want to pick the delta by looking at the distribution within each gender x age pool.
They could even make a projection of future cutoff times and take that into account when setting the baseline qualifying times. In other words, be a little more generous with the 18-34 group initially knowing that you'll like penalize them more with your one-size-fits-all cutoff. I'm not sure if they do that.
Also, the current qualifying times are all multiples of 5 minutes. If they really want to improve balance between groups, the low-hanging fruit is to make those more granular.
I also don't understand what the motives are behind how the age/gender buckets are calculated in the first place. I'm not sure if it's public or not.
Are they:
* Trying to calculate based on an nth percentile finishing time across each bucket?
* Trying to ensure roughly equal percentages of applicants from each bucket get accepted?
* Something else?
just to add this to the mix: there are faster and slower marathon courses, so you can improve your qualifying time by running in one of them. "downhill" seems to be a promising factor.
https://findmymarathon.com/fastestmarathoncourses-state.php?...
In the meantime, if you're at all curious about the kinds of levels to which people go with trying to predict the cutoff check out this blog[1]. This is from Brian Rock [2], who every year collects data about a lot of marathons all over the world and then tries to guess the official cutoff for the Boston marathon. Very cool stuff!
[1]: https://runningwithrock.com/boston-marathon-cutoff-time-trac... [2]: https://runningwithrock.com/about-me/
Number of male and female entrants in the 18-39 age group are almost even, but the proportion of female entrants drops in the older age groups.
This pattern appears in 2024 and 2023 as well.
see https://registration.baa.org/2025/cf/Public/iframe_Statistic...
As unlikely as it sounds Strava predicts 3:13 (think they base it on my last marathon), Garmin is similar. Runalyze is about as off as you are.
Maybe you're putting too much emphasis on weekly volume. M35 and I can run this with 50k weekly and 75k peak volume. Relatively confident I'd be able to sub 3 with weekly volume of 80k/100k peak.
As for me, I don't run. Props to anyone who can run a BQ and enjoy it.
Boston Marathon tour operators: https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/plan/international... and https://www.baa.org/boston-marathon-international-tour-progr...
Abbott World Marathon Majors draw program: https://www.worldmarathonmajors.com/content-hub/majors-draw-...
I run a lot of races and cutoff time has always meant the amount of time you have to finish the race.
y'all better safety-qualify at least -6 minutes tho, -7 if you can
YEAR FIELD SIZE CUT-OFF NOT ACCEPTED
2024 30,000 5:29 11,039
2025 30,000 6:51 12,324I would have expected the opposite.
Boston allows "roughly" 25k participants, but that number fluctuates somewhat every year. If they allow 30k, the cutoff delta goes down. If they allowed an unlimited field, the cutoff delta would be 0, and you'd only have to worry about your published qualifying time.