Best marathons to qualify for Boston: the BQ Course Index

We did not invent a score. A course makes the ranked shortlist only if it passes four rules, and the shortlist is then ordered by one number you can check.

1. It counts for Boston. The course has an active USATF certification. The B.A.A. accepts courses certified by USATF, AIMS or a national governing body, and sets timing and other rules too; confirm them with the race.
2. No downhill penalty. Net drop is under 1,500 ft, so the B.A.A. adds no time to your result.
3. A cool start. The median temperature at the official start time, over at least three recent editions, is 50°F (10°C) or lower.
4. Not Boston. Boston is in the table, but you need a qualifier or a charity entry to run it, so it is not ranked.

Shortlisted courses are ordered by net drop, the start elevation minus the finish elevation printed on the USATF certificate. Ties go to the lower median dew point. Every other race follows, sorted by net drop.

Why temperature and net drop

A study of seven marathons over as many as 36 years (Ely and colleagues, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2007) found a progressive slowing of marathon performance as heat stress rose from 5 to 25°C, and slower runners lost more than the leaders. That study used wet-bulb globe temperature, which needs sun and wind data we do not have, so we use air temperature at the start and set the cut-off at 50°F. The cut-off is our choice, not a physiological threshold.

Net drop is recorded on every USATF certificate. It ignores the hills in between: a course can finish lower than it starts and still climb a lot. USATF certificates do not list total climb, so we cannot rank by it.

Since registration for the 2027 race, the B.A.A. adds time to qualifying results from steep net-downhill courses: five minutes for a net drop of 1,500 to 2,999 ft, ten minutes for 3,000 to 5,999 ft, and courses that drop 6,000 ft or more do not count at all. For 2027 it accepted 240 qualifying times that carried an index. It says the bands may change before 2028 registration.

In the USATF database, 37 US marathon events have an active certification with a listed drop of at least 1,500 ft. For 18 of them the certificate's start and finish elevations confirm it: 7 fall in the +10:00 band and 11 in the +5:00 band. None reaches 6,000 ft. Two races in our index are among them: the St. George Marathon (2,559 ft, +5:00) and REVEL Big Cottonwood (5,259 ft, +10:00). The B.A.A. makes the final call on any course.

• Certification, course code and elevations: USATF Road Running Technical Council course database (certifiedroadraces.com). Where USATF lists several certifications for a race, we used the most recent one and say which in the dataset. Net drop comes from the start and finish elevations on the certificate; for a few older, scanned certificates we used the drop the database lists (in m/km) times 42.195 km.
• Dates, start times, start locations and finisher counts: each race's official website or the results page it links to. A next date shows TBA until the organizer publishes it. Finisher counts appear only where the organizer or its results provider publishes a total; most do not.
• Start-line weather: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Hourly (Integrated Surface Database). For each past edition we took the observation closest to the official start time, within 45 minutes, at the nearest station to the start that is within 40 km and within 300 m of the start's elevation. Courses with no such station (St. George, Big Cottonwood, Steamtown, Big Sur) show no weather rather than a guess.
• Qualifying rules and downhill bands: the Boston Athletic Association.

Limits

• This is version 1, not a census. USATF lists 1,526 active marathon-distance certifications, many of them repeat certifications of the same race. The B.A.A. publishes only its five most-used qualifying races each year, so we could not rank every US race by how many qualifiers it produces.
• A median start temperature is history, not a forecast. Weather at an airport a few miles away can differ from the start line.
• Certification status changes. Check the race's own site and the USATF database before you register.

Found an error, or want a race added? Tell us and we will check it against the source.

Pick the race second. First, know the pace your standard asks for: a 3:00:00 marathon is 6:52 per mile (4:16 per km), and a 3:30:00 is 8:01 per mile (4:59 per km). The marathon pace chart has every finish time, and the race time predictor estimates a marathon time from a recent 10K or half marathon.

Then train for the cut-off, not the standard. For 2027, the B.A.A. accepted qualifiers who beat their standard by 5:17 or more, and turned away 8,019 who had qualified. Our Boston qualifying times page has every standard by age and the cut-off history.

Our marathon plans run 12 to 20 weeks. Start from a 16-week intermediate marathon plan or, if you already run high mileage, the 16-week advanced plan. The VDOT calculator turns a recent race into training paces. Or browse every marathon training plan.