Looking for the best race to qualify for the Boston Marathon? A downhill marathon might be right for you.

Boston Globe

15-04-2025

Runners always are looking for every edge: the best shoes, the best training methods — and for some, the best courses to give them a chance to qualify for Boston.
So, what are the best qualifying marathons for Boston? Well, it depends on how you define 'best.'
Among the 25,170 qualifiers accepted for the 2025 Boston Marathon, the Chicago Marathon produced the most entrants, with 2,407 earning their 'BQ' in the Windy City in 2023.
The Boston Marathon, long the foremost producer of qualifiers for its own race, had to settle for second with 1,789 accepted qualifiers this year.
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Chicago has become king for BQs among World Marathon Majors thanks to a huge field (48,574 finishers in 2023) and a famously flat, fast course — only 240 feet of total elevation gain, less than a third of the 800-plus feet of climbing runners take on in Boston and New York.
Of the 25,170 qualifiers accepted for the 2025 Boston Marathon, nearly 10 percent earned their qualifying time at the Chicago Marathon in 2023.
Tess Crowley/Associated Press
The rest of the top 10 includes the remainder of the World Marathon Majors, with London 2024 (1,020 entrants) in third, Berlin 2023 (739) in fourth, New York 2023 (581) in sixth, and Tokyo 2024 in ninth (484).
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The California International Marathon, a popular fall option thanks to its mild Sacramento weather in December and net downhill course (dropping 340 feet from start to finish), sneaks into the top five with 688 entrants.
Rounding out the top 10 is a relative newcomer to producing BQs: the 2023 REVEL Big Bear Marathon, with 425 qualifiers in this year's Boston Marathon field, while the 2024 REVEL Mt. Charleston Marathon is just behind with 411.
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The REVEL Race Series, which mainly operates in places like Utah, Nevada, and California, has been gaining traction in the amateur marathoning world. It recently expanded to the East, debuting REVEL White Mountains in Conway, N.H., last May.
REVEL races are spectacular, scenic, and most importantly, extremely fast, utilizing courses with massive downhill profiles as runners chase PRs with help from gravity.
Downhill courses are nothing new, but REVEL has kicked things up a notch. While the Boston Marathon drops around 460 feet from start to finish, a significant net downhill compared with other major marathons, races like REVEL Big Bear and Mt. Charleston drop more than 5,000 feet.
The courses for REVEL Big Bear and Mt. Charleston have an average decline grade of around 3.7 percent. That's steeper than the final major downhill in Boston — the far side of Heartbreak Hill, which drops at a grade of around 3.1 percent — carried over the entire 26.2-mile course.
The result? The REVEL Race Series has become a haven for those chasing personal bests, along with being well-received by athletes for their organization and amenities.
'The REVEL races are PR factories,' said Phil Dumontet, CEO of Brooksee, the company behind REVEL. 'They're really fun, fast, scenic courses typically started at top of the mountain and finished in a really fun, spectator-friendly area. We've loved seeing the reception from our participants.'
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But REVEL also has risen to the forefront of a conversation about downhill races and their place in the world of competitive amateur running, as their qualifying prominence within fields such as Boston's continues to grow.
For the 2019 Boston Marathon, there were around 1,200 athletes in the field who qualified at an extreme downhill race — one with at least 2,000 feet of elevation drop — with 640 qualifying at a REVEL race.
In 2025, the number of qualifiers from downhill races rose to around 2,000, with 1,343 coming from REVEL races, nearly double that total from six years earlier.
When you look at the races with the highest percentage of finishers who achieve a BQ (and exclude races with qualifying times just to get in, like the US Olympic Marathon Trials and BQ.2 marathons), downhill races like REVEL are prominent. Seven of the top 15 from 2024 had net downhill profiles of at least 2,000 feet.
(It is notable, however, that the Charles River Marathon, a small race on a 2.6-mile loop between Brighton and Watertown, comes out on top. It's a race among another growing group: 'micro' marathons, run with small, competitive fields on smaller, looped courses.)
Racing downhill might provide something of a speed advantage, but it certainly isn't easy. While Boston newcomers fear the uphill climbs of the Newton hills, race veterans know the real trap lies on the other side, where the downhills do a number on your quads.
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That pounding goes to another level when you're talking about 5,000 feet of net drop instead of 500.
'Ask any REVEL finisher how their quads felt the next day, myself included, and they'll tell you, it's brutal on your legs,' Dumontet said. 'Our philosophy is, you still have to train hard, you have to race smart. You earn every step of that BQ time.'
Dumontet notes that all of REVEL's courses are certified by USA Track and Field and accepted by the BAA for qualification. The question is whether that will remain the case.
The US Olympic Marathon Trials, for example, limits the downhill drop of qualifying courses to the 460 feet or so of net decline you'd find in Boston.
The discussion around qualifying courses, downhill or otherwise, has arisen in the BAA offices, but any change in policy isn't forthcoming any time soon.
'We have been in communication with World Athletics and USATF on their rules for downhill racing and what [courses] people can use to qualify for certain events. But again, we're very preliminary,' said Mary Kate Shea, the BAA's director of professional athletes. 'We still have a ways to go with the data scientists and statisticians, to make an informed decision which has to be communicated effectively to everybody.'
The BAA has been perceived, at times, to be a little slow reacting to shifting winds within the running world. But as the organization is always looking years down the line — qualifying standards for the 2026 Boston Marathon had to be set in 2024, for example — there's little choice but to take its time.
'I would never want us to be changing the game on people,' BAA CEO Jack Fleming said. 'We know that people are waking up on a daily basis thinking about how to qualify, how to run, where to run, how to get here, to Boston. That's a really powerful reminder for us as we make decisions.'
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No mass-participation marathon has a more competitive qualifying process than Boston,
For now, runners will keep searching for ways to tilt the odds in their favor — including harnessing the tilt of a topographical map, scaling a mountain in the hopes that a BQ might be waiting for them at the bottom.
Amin Touri can be reached at