Registering for Boston

Boston registration started today, but with the new rolling registration system and me having less than a 5 minute buffer, I won't be able to register until next Monday.  I booked my hotel for Boston last week as I'm pretty confident I will be able to get in.  There have been a bunch of different people(here, here and here) who have been data crunching the results list of various races over the past year and they are predicting a minimal cutoff because there are a lot fewer qualifiers compared to this time last year. Most of the drop off was due to the warm conditions in Boston this year, but also a lot of other races this past summer have had crappy conditions so the pool of potential qualifiers have dropped significantly.  Actually, the whole idea is a pretty interesting data mining project.  If they had this registration system back when I was in grad school, I probably would have taken the task to do the analysis as it's fairly rich dataset that would have been easy to work with.  

Looking at peoples times is one thing, but the one wildcard in this was the number of places that Boston was going to offer next year.  All of the above analysis assume that the number of entries next year would be the same as last year which was 30,000.  Obviously, if the number dropped, with fewer place available, the competition gets more heated and the analysis would go out the window.  I was holding out on committing to Boston until I knew the number of places for next year, which they announced last week at 30,000 so that was good and the hotel was booked.

I also applied to the lottery for Tokyo and London for next year which take place in February and the week after Boston, respectively.  With my luck, after striking out over the past few years, the one year I don't want to get in will probably result in me getting into both of them!  I'll cross that bridge when I get to it though it'll be a nice problem to have.