This mostly turns the event into an event for runners, and no longer a fun-run.
I am slow, and would have no trouble at all with two and a half hours. The one marathon I ran: I was two hours ten at the half way point. For context, world class runners do a whole marathon faster than this.
My marathon time would never qualify for a proper world event. But it’d be nice to maybe do a half. This time limit keeps it accessible to runners of ‘human’ levels, still.
Data from last year’s event showed 1439 of the 7065 runners who received a finishing time for the half-marathon took more than two hours and 30 minutes.
Pretty dumb decision then.
These events are usually commercial (and charge an arm and a leg) so they might be paying more for the extra time (road access, security/police, whatever other costs?) than they can recover from the slower runners
I can’t help but feel that, given the categories for inclusion in the international marathon circuit “include participation, organisation and legacy”, that doing something that harms the ability for community participation and makes it look poorly organised might not help the event win the professional recognition it wants.
Non-paywalled: https://archive.is/oqTj6
