As featured in Runner's World: I recently spoke with Runner's World about the signs coaches look for when determining whether an athlete is ready to pursue a Boston qualifying time. You can read Emilia Benton's full article, Coaches Reveal the Signs They Look For That You Could Run a Boston Qualifying Time, here.
Are you ready to try to qualify for Boston?
It sounds like a simple question. Look at your Boston qualifying standard, compare it to your current PR, plug a recent race into a calculator, and see how close you are.
Those things matter. But I think there’s a much bigger question we should be asking:
Have you built the athlete who can handle the training required to run that time?
Runner’s World included me in its article, Coaches Reveal the Signs They Look For That You Could Run a Boston Qualifying Time, alongside coaches Natalie Mitchell and Alissa Kolarik. I talked about choosing a course that gives an athlete a good opportunity to execute a big PR or BQ attempt, which is certainly part of the equation.
But my conversation with writer Emilia Benton went much deeper than course selection, and I want to dig into that here. Because if I were sitting down with an athlete who told me, “I want to qualify for Boston,” my first instinct would not be to pull up a marathon plan. I’d zoom out.
First, how big is the gap?
Your Boston qualifying standard gives us a destination. Your current fitness tells us where we're starting. Those aren't always particularly close to one another. If your qualifying standard is 3:55 and you recently ran 3:59, we're having a very different conversation than if your marathon PR is 4:35.
Neither conversation is, “You can” or “You can't.” It's a conversation about timeline.
We can look at recent marathon and half-marathon performances. We can also look at training history, current volume, workout performances and how consistently you've been able to train. Race equivalency calculators can give us additional information about whether your speed at shorter distances currently supports the marathon performance we're chasing.
But I don't want to use any one of those things as a permission slip. I want to use all of them to start mapping the distance between the athlete you are today and the athlete we're trying to build.
And these days, we're not really trying to build someone who can squeak underneath their Boston qualifying standard. A BQ doesn't necessarily mean an entry into Boston. The published Runner’s World article addresses this too, with coaches discussing the need to build several minutes of buffer rather than simply targeting the qualifying standard. That makes the long game even more important.
Your BQ attempt doesn't have to start with marathon training
This is where I tend to get a little nontraditional.
Let's say we've established that you have a meaningful gap to close. My recommendation might be: Don't train for a marathon.
Not yet, at least.
Instead, we might spend 12 weeks training like you're preparing for a half marathon. You may race one at the end. You may not.
And yes, I know I just suggested that runners spend three months training without necessarily getting a medal at the end. Somewhere along the way, a race registration website just felt a disturbance in the Force.
But there's a purpose in my approach here.
Without the immediate pressure of a marathon hanging over us, we have room to gradually increase your running volume and see how your body responds. We have room to establish consistent strength training instead of treating it like the first thing that gets sacrificed when marathon mileage climbs.
We can work on running mechanics or accessory strength you've been neglecting.
We can experiment with fueling.
We can figure out hydration.
We can work on recovery.
We can practice harder workouts and learn the difference between productive discomfort and turning every Tuesday into the Olympic Trials.
And perhaps most importantly, life can happen. Because it will.
A kid gets sick. Work explodes. You travel. Your sleep goes sideways. Something starts niggling. It's 97 degrees with the atmospheric consistency of soup.
A development cycle has enough flexibility to accommodate those things without every interruption feeling like your Boston dream is circling the drain.
We're building capacity rather than constantly proving fitness.
Then we build again
After that 12-week cycle, I don't necessarily want to immediately launch you into marathon training.
We can deload. Let the body absorb the work. Look at what went well. Look at what we discovered. And decide what layer comes next.
For some athletes, that may be the marathon cycle. For others, I might build another intermediate cycle toward something like a 30K.
Now we're nudging volume and long-run durability farther while continuing to work on everything we established during the previous cycle.
Suddenly we're several months down the road and you're entering marathon training from an entirely different starting point.
Instead of asking the marathon cycle to build your mileage, teach you to fuel, establish your strength routine, improve your durability, develop your mental skills, AND make you significantly faster over 26.2 miles, we've already checked a whole lot of those boxes.
Now we can actually train for the marathon.
The marathon cycle shouldn't have to fix everything
This is probably the heart of my argument...
We ask an awful lot of marathon training. Sometimes too much, in fact.
An athlete starts a 16- or 20-week marathon cycle and simultaneously decides they're going to run more mileage than ever, start lifting consistently, learn to fuel, fix their form, improve their sleep, figure out hydration, become mentally tougher and knock 25 minutes off their marathon PR.
Cool. Very chill little four-month project.
Instead, I want those skills layered over time.
If fueling is a weakness, let's discover that during the half-marathon development cycle and work on it.
If you struggle to recover from higher mileage, I want to know that before we're stacking marathon-specific workouts on top of it.
If strength disappears every time your running gets harder, we need to find a version of strength training you can sustain.
If one bad workout sends you into a spiral about whether you're losing fitness, we have time to develop some psychological flexibility around training.
If you repeatedly develop the same ache as mileage increases, that's information.
Every training cycle gives us data. The goal is to actually use it.
Durability deserves as much attention as fitness
Runners love fitness because fitness is easy to see.
Our watch gives us numbers. We can compare splits. We can run a race and get a shiny new PR.
Durability isn't nearly as sexy. It looks like completing another week. And another. And then another.
It's handling a long run and being capable of training again afterward.
It's absorbing a harder workout rather than needing several days to recover from it.
It's having enough strength and tissue capacity to tolerate increasing training demands.
It's fueling enough to support the work.
It's knowing when to push and when backing off for two days will preserve the next six weeks.
Fitness helps you run fast. Durability gives you enough uninterrupted training to become fast.
For an athlete chasing a major breakthrough, I care deeply about both.
The long game makes runners uncomfortable
Here's where this strategy becomes a surprisingly difficult sell.
Athletes want the marathon on the calendar. They want the countdown and the "best" training plan. They want to know that 16 weeks from Sunday they're going to stand on a starting line and shoot their shot.
I understand why. Goals are exciting.
But if you're 20, 30 or 40 minutes away from the performance you ultimately want, we need to be willing to consider whether repeatedly throwing yourself into marathon cycles is actually the fastest way to get there.
Sometimes the breakthrough comes from not attempting the breakthrough yet.
Spend a season getting stronger. Build more volume. Run a faster half. Learn to fuel. Get comfortable with strength training. Practice recovering. Deload. Build again.
Then enter marathon training with a body that's capable of tolerating more and a brain carrying months of evidence that you can handle the work.
That isn't postponing the goal. That's what it looks like to train for it with intention.
Your BQ roadmap might look different than you expected
Instead of: Marathon plan → BQ attempt
Your roadmap might look something like:
12-week half-marathon development cycle → deload → 30K development cycle → deload → marathon-specific cycle → BQ attempt
You may not necessarily need every step. An athlete who is already close to their qualifying standard and has years of consistent training behind them may be ready to move directly into marathon-specific work.
Someone with a larger gap, inconsistent training history, recurring injuries or several neglected pieces may benefit enormously from spending six months or a year building first.
There is no prize for getting to the marathon cycle fastest. We're looking for the route that gives you the best odds of eventually getting where you want to go.
So, are you ready to chase a Boston qualifier?
I'd ask yourself some of these questions:
- How consistently have I trained over the last six to twelve months?
- How far is my current fitness from the performance I'll actually need?
- Can I tolerate increasing volume without constantly breaking down?
- Can I recover from workouts well enough to keep training?
- Am I strength training consistently?
- Do I know how to fuel and hydrate for long efforts?
- Can I adapt when training doesn't go according to plan?
- Do I have enough experience to distinguish a bad day from a fitness problem?
- Am I willing to spend more than one training cycle developing the athlete required to reach this goal?
And perhaps the biggest one:
Am I trying to get ready for a BQ attempt, or am I willing to become a stronger runner first?
Those aren't quite the same thing.
Boston qualifying standards are objective. The process of becoming capable of running one isn't.
There will always be runners who make enormous jumps in one training cycle. There will be runners who qualify on their first serious attempt. There will be people whose progression looks absolutely nothing like the neat little roadmap I just described.
But when I'm coaching an athlete, I'm not interested in designing a plan around the most exceptional possible outcome.
I'm interested in increasing their odds of success. Sometimes that means taking the longer road. And sometimes the longer road is exactly where the breakthrough gets built.