Wave Start At Boston

The Boston Marathon has announced two significant changes to the race; one will affect me, the other may not. The bigger and more noticable change is the implementation of a wave start. The main start will go off at its traditional noon time. Elite women and wheelchairs will have an earlier start as has been done in the recent past. The change occurs by taking the second half of the main start and launching it 30 minutes later than usual, at 12:30. The expectation is that this will permit each start to take about 10 minutes, rather than the 30 minutes that was typical in the past.

The press release (LetsRun's Posting) about this indicates that there will be in essence two athlete's villages at Hopkinton High School, and each will be brought to the start shortly before their assigned time. It seemed to be implied that part of the reason for this was to try to keep the race on good terms with Hopkinton homeowners, who were, understandably, upset at having runners urinating and defecating on their lawns and in their bushes. I'm hopeful that this aspect of the race, one that is, to a great extent, a dysfuntion of its size, will be brought under control. It would be a real shame if the oldest annual marathon in the world were to need to sacrifice tradition because of this situation.

The second change is that to facilitate traffic movement in Boston, the race will cross under Massachusetts Avenue rather than on it. (I assume there is a tunnel with ramp that will allow this without slowing the runners.) I also expect that this change will create some challenges for TV coverage of the race. This change will not affect the start or finish line locations. (So says the press release, I expect it will change one or the other, but by an insignificant distance.)

Also, Jesse Squire, a noted running statistician, has posted his annual lists of the fastest American men and women marathoners. They are in pdf format, so you must have Adobe PDF or PDF reader to view them. If you don't, you can visit www.adobe.com to download a free copy of PDF Reader. Note: these lists tend to be "living creatures" for the first few weeks after their publication as non-Americans are culled and missed performances added.