Firstly, thanks for reading the ToS and for raising your concern. Not that it means much, but our goal is not to screw over our users. This is the first time someone has raised an issue with the ToS.

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.

OTOH, it's nice when companies that will screw you over, signal that, by having lawyers appear to carefully set up the cover for them to do so.

Same. Paused the signup process to take a look at how they were going to use my data, and then decided against it once I understood.

Brian Rock's tracker is great. It's a ton of work to collect and maintain that estimate throughout the year, so we hope he keeps it up!

I have a friend who has run it for charity multiple times. They're a six-ish-plus hour marathoner. My partner has run them in the last 10 miles a couple of times pre-bombing. Her take is that it's pretty miserable if you're that slow because they start breaking down the course, the aid stations get light on supplies, and the porta-potties get unspeakable. So yeah, you can, but it would be a better experience if you're not quite so far behind a BQ time.

As for me, I don't run. Props to anyone who can run a BQ and enjoy it.

I was wondering if they would let a total slug run the marathon for money. It turns out that they expect you to run it in under 6 hours (which is a slow "recreational" pace). You're also expected to raise an average of $15,000, but it may be more depending on the charity. More details here: https://www.charityteams.com/boston-faqs

According to https://sportstoursinternational.co.uk/blog/how-to-get-entry..., you can also gain entry via a tour operator for non-USA entrants or if you've already run several of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, there's a draw program.

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-...

It's not about _qualified_ runners, it's about the size of the total field accepted.

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.

The slider adjusts the number allowed to run (apparently the pool of time qualified candidates can be assumed to be larger than the max value of the slider).

It's a cutoff delta, you have to subtract it from the "preliminary" qualifying time.

We have a friend who has qualified three times but has never run it due to the cutoff. Maybe the BAA should consider a separate bucket for these runners.

Betteridge's law of Boston qualifying times.

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.

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.

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?

there is now a time adjustment for downhill, and extreme downhills are no longer qualifying

https://runtothefinish.com/downhill-boston-qualifiers/