B.A.A Urges Marathon Runners To Register This Week

The day after the 2013 Boston Marathon. Photo by Regina Mogilevskaya

The Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) is urging qualifiers for the 2014 Boston Marathon to submit their entries this week. On Wednesday, the B.A.A. wrote on its Facebook page, “[I]t is unlikely that registration will re-open next week.” That means Friday at 5 p.m. is your last chance.

Registration opened Monday for time-qualifiers for the 2014 marathon, and of the 22,000 time-qualifier spots available, only 5,000 remained. Runner’s World is reporting that roughly 7,500 runners submitted their entries, which ensures “that the number of legitimate applications will exceed 22,000.”

The B.A.A. had originally planned to re-open registration on Monday, September 23 if time-qualifier spots remained, but that is now unlikely. Even though there will be 9,000 more runners in the 2014 race (the B.A.A. is allowing entry to runners who were not able to finish due to the bombings), the additional interest in next year’s race has event organizers expecting registration to fill up this week.

The B.A.A. verifies the legitimacy of every application it receives, and they say that the process will continue into next week, after registration is closed.

According to Runner’s World:

The B.A.A. will then rank all legitimate entries submitted between September 16 and 20, and rank them on the basis of how far an applicant’s qualifying time was under his or her gender and age-group standard. For example, a 59-year-old man whose qualifying time was 3 minutes under his standard (3:40) would be ranked ahead of a 29-year-old woman whose qualifying time was 2 minutes under her standard (3:35), even though the woman had the faster qualifying time.