[abeppu]

Methodologically, why would you have one cutoff vs a different cutoff per group (as there are different qualifying times per group)?

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.

[steadyelk]

It could be intentional. For a lot of folks, running the Boston Marathon is a dream, so maybe the BAA wants to make that dream just slightly more attainable the older you get.

[poutrathor]

As always it's probably because maths still is too hard for most people and keeping the rule simple won over fairness.

[votepaunchy]

Ironman just switched to age-grading, which is just as simple and already used by many runner training plans and race calculators.

https://www.ironman.com/news/age-group-qualification-system

[adrianmonk]

They can also improve that balance by adjusting the qualifying times from year to year, and they do.

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.

[rconti]

Yeah, doing it by flat time delta rather than percent delta seems fundamentally flawed, but of course it makes it easier for the average person to understand.

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?

[k2enemy]

Making sure they can accept a lot of high disposable income 40+ runners that will buy a lot of merch. The time cutoffs start to get much easier after 40.

[Guillaume86]

Doesn't look true, I inputed the times in an age grading calculator and 39 cutoff time was easier than 44, even if it's not very accurate I doubt it's "much easier".

[scott_w]

It’s a common problem. Time trialling uses Age Adjusted Time for events which uses a flat time reduction based on age. One guy pointed out the absurdity that he’s still extremely fast in his 50s, so his AAT end up impossibly fast, winning him a lot of events as a result!