All is right in the world of the Boston Marathon. Everyone who had a BQ and wanted to register for the race received a spot in their initial two-week registration period. This is great news!

Although I had already received my spot during the first week, I was interested in how the rest of the registration period would play out. My friend’s at Runner’s World decided to help me along.

In my initial analysis assuming this year’s registration demand matched last year’s registration demand, I figured about 5,000 spots would remain. What that number did not take into account was people improving to hit the new standard. However, It does seem like the marginal BQers might have worked just hard enough to be marginal BQers once again. Last year 8,243 individuals were in this group, by far the largest of the groups. The last 59 seconds had 2,000 of the people. With the last group this year only being a 5 minute interval instead of a 5:59 minute interval there is no reason to believe that there would not a similar clustering of individuals at the tail end. Assuming a similar distribution in the last group and just accounting for the lost 59 seconds would result in about 7,000 entries. This would bring the number of entries to 18,800 once the deferrals were included too.

Runners World announced about 2,500 qualifier spots remain out of the 21,600.

So there are 19,100 runners registered. Not far off from 18,800.

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Last year the race accepted 20,081 qualified runners. Why the sudden jump to 21,600 this year?

I think the B.A.A. wanted to see how the registration would play out in a normal year without the deferrals and an easy way to do that would be to increase the field size by the number of deferrals.

They aren’t making a statement on when they think it will sell out.

So I will play my own prediction game.

I used Marathon Guide to compile a list of both the races with the highest percentage of BQs and the largest number of BQs through the weekend of the New York City Marathon. My methods are not completely scientific but I browsed through the list of marathons and it seemed to account for the major ones in the United States and Canada. Also this list excludes foreign marathons, except for Canadian marathons. However, with the exception of maybe the Berlin Marathon, I think that qualifiers from foreign marathons will have a negligible effect of the number of available spots.

The number of qualifiers are the number of qualifiers under the old standards.

I remember the “40% of people who BQ register” statistic being thrown around but I haven’t been able to verify it. Also it is likely that a good majority of the people who do want to run Boston will have already registered. However, my bets are that it will close the weekend of the Chicago Marathon. If you are racing that weekend and want to run I would get to a computer as quickly as possible. So you better hurry Claire when you qualify in Chicago!

Whatever happens I have more faith in the certainty of this prediction than in the economic forecasts I have done at work in the past. If nothing else, at least it was more fun and interesting.

When do you think it will close?