No Boston?

Some suck-ass news on the running front... no Boston in 2010. Sadly enough, the event reached its maximum number of registrations at the beginning of November. To be honest, I couldn't have gone anyways. It was either Boston or a wedding in Jamaica for a good friend of mine and that would be tough to say, "Hey, listen. I can afford to go to one or the other... and... well... I'm choosing something selfish. Have a great time." But honestly, destination weddings look good on paper but suck when it comes down to logistics. Turns out I'm glad we didn't go through with ours. Music Hall ended up being the bee's knees. It just sucks when you have to choose.

So here's to 2011, right!?! That could depend on a number of things. First, 2009 was the first year EVER that Boston sold out and it did so at the end of January. Registration usually closes at the end of March. This year, registration got capped in November which is an obvious result of it being capped early for 2009. But November!?! At this rate, it's going to be a frenzied registration war if they don't do something about it. Which leads me to believe that they will do something about it. Could be a number of things, but one idea folks were tossing around would be to eliminate the "mercy minute". The mercy minute is the :59 added to BQ times (ie: 3:10:59, 3:40:59). It would save thousands of spots and make it much less confusing, but then my 3:10:02 wouldn't count. I'd need to shave 0:00:02 off my PR to qualify. There's also talk of eliminating the opportunity to use one BQ to enter two consecutive marathons. After a certain date (somewhere in September) your BQ counts for the next year as well as the year after that (ie: my time in Columbus could've gotten me into Boston '10 as well as Boston '11). Seems like one BQ should get you one marathon and that's it. But again, I get the short end of the stick because I'd have to qualify again.

Now, I know that a lot can happen in the course of a year, but I plan to continue running for a long time and my hope is that a 3:10:02 is not my PR by a long shot, but you just never know from race to race. Some days you've got it, others you don't and there ain't a damn thing you can do when mother nature rears her ugly head. It would've been easy to get pretty pissed if I would've opted out of Columbus in order to have a better race in Indy only to be greeted by a 20mph headwind at the turn. It makes it pretty tough to train for 3-4 months in some cases and encounter a humid, 88º day in October... in Chicago. It's impossible to plan for something like that. So if they change the rules, which I'm sure they will, I'll just have to get faster. So, Boston in 2011? I'll see what I can do.