Down the Rabbit Hole...

I often joke that my hobby is collecting hobbies. Baking, canoeing, watch-building, barbecue, gardening, biking, fly fishing, hunting, woodworking, and beer-making are just a few I've picked up over the years or am currently pursuing. Each new interest has a rabbit hole phase, and I'm there at the moment with marathoning. That means a lot of time spent reading webpages, and ordering books.

A couple of websites I've found interesting.

• https://miloandthecalf.com/the-bq-questionnaire/

• https://www.halhigdon.com/training/marathon-training/

I'm also thinking of ordering a couple of books from great coaches. The name Arthur Lydiard rang a bell when I saw it. I remember that name from when I ran high school cross country in the early '80s.

I've been pondering which marathons to run to prepare to qualify and then which marathons to run to actually qualify. I'll be 60 for the 2027 Boston, so my qualifying window will begin September 1, 2025, and end September 15, 2026.

I plan to run one marathon well before that window to gauge my conditioning. That race will probably be in the spring of 2025. The possibilities currently include the Paris Marathon in April 2025 because I'm a Francophile and have loved Paris since I lived there. I would like to run Paris, but I think the money can be better spent elsewhere. Another candidate is the Chattanooga Marathon, which runs a block from my house.

Once the window opens there are many possibilities and I plan to run one every four months until I post a time in the low 3:40s. A qualifying time is only valid if the course is certified. The certification only addresses the length; not the topography. In other words, the course can be, and some are, straight down a mountain So there are quite a few marathons designed with Boston in mind that have no uphills and thousands of feet of descent. So I've thought of one of those.

There are many lists of best BQ marathons and i've looked at quite a few of those. One race that isn't mentioned on those lists is the Valencia (Spain) marathon. But the Valencia Marathon produces among the most PRs among the elite runners registered for Boston. Other races that produce a lot of PRs are Chicago, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Boston, and NYC. The number of PRs may have less to do with the course and more to do with the prize money though. Elite runners generally avoid the downhill runs I described earlier because, while they are eligible for a BQ, they aren't eligible for a certified record. There are limits on the amount of decline for that purpose.

Enough about all of that. I'll be running and researching.