These people shouldn’t be allowed to enter the London Marathon

[Notbeinggoadybut]

Like most runners I put my name into the ballot every year, and have never been picked not bitter at all.

The footage of the “last finishers” sets my teeth off a bit. I think if you can’t finish the marathon in say, 6.5-7 hours, you shouldn’t be taking a ballot place that could be allocated to someone who actually wants to RUN the marathon. There are plenty of walking marathons for people who prefer to walk, don’t be selfish and take a slight after place for a RUNNING race. I mean the key is even in the slogan, “We run together”.

AIBU?

I don't agree. It's such a good opportunity for charities to raise money and probably one of their main fundraising events of the year. It also generates a lot of revenue for London, which benefits everyone. Surely there are tons of 'proper' marathons all over the UK, where these unfit people won't 'steal' your place!

@RoseBucket We are talking about ballot entries who don’t turn up on the day. Not sure how that benefits the charity and their runners, how can they open the ballot up again in the day, they can’t.

They offer more places than they actually have space for, because they've already accounted for people who won't turn up.

Why should your time of around 5 hours be good enough to enter the ballot and not something slower? There are so many ways to get in and the ballot is for everyone. If you really want to do it then train hard for GFA or raise money for charity (which is also hard because you have to raise several thousand). I'm a runner and never been successful in the ballot but I know there are other options that I'm working towards

Have you ever run a marathon, OP?

I often find people with attitudes like this are people who have knocked out a few 2-2.5h half maras and think that means they can do a 5 hour marathon. They have never experienced the mental and physical barrier that hits you at mile 20.

I never see attitudes like this from “fast” runners. My club has many GFA runners and they always stay behind to cheer on the back of the pack.

You know people doing 5 hours are still walking parts, right? You also say you won’t enter the ballot if you were old - I know a woman in her late 50s who is faster than you by about an hour.

As someone who is on the slow end of very average and who admits speed is beyond them, I’m not sure why you have a such a high and mighty attitude?

YABU. There's nothing superior about your hobby activity over theirs.

OP, I'd be interested to know how much you actually do train for a marathon? I have in the past been quite a fast runner, and I definitely don't judge people who run around 5 hours. I also don't judge people who don't have time to do lots of training (I don't myself at the moment). But when I used to run London, I would have trained 5-6 times a week year-round, building up to 7-8 times a week in the lead-up to the race. I'd have put about 7 or 8 hours a week into training. Doing that, I'd have been surprised if I couldn't run 3:45 as a woman under 40, and I didn't know many people regularly doing more than 50 miles a week who couldn't run under 4 hours.

The main difference between us though is that I wouldn't have said people doing less training than me were not 'proper' runners.

But GFA is there so that if you are good enough you can run it. If not, you take your chances in the ballot with everyone else. And GFA is attainable for most people but it is a lot of work/time commitment.

you oculd have done a virtual marathon @Notbeinggoadybut

I'm going to probably face even more hatred but I feel it's actually even harder for male runners. My husband was a decent runner (sub 40 min 10k) and would love to have represented his club at London Marathon but the qualifying GFA time for a man is sub 3h compared to 3h45 for a woman. Yes he put in for a club place but in a running club of 900+ there's quite a lot of competition for those too!

The gentleman who crossed the line last had been in a car accident

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-65378090?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_link_type=web_link&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_link_id=8731B60A-E336-11ED-B5C7-E39179448730&at_medium=social&at_format=link&at_link_origin=BBCNews&at_campaign_type=owned&at_ptr_name=twitter

OP might not approve of this guy's timescales for a marathon
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18228635

That's not the same though

Done a marathon as a training session and it was so boring.

I said this upthread. The relative GFA qualifying times make it much more achievable for women than men. I believe this is to balance the sexes more.
Good.

I had a very frustrating debate with a race organiser who was failing to understand that the qualifying time for a 5K race being 19 mins was favouring men over women. He kept saying "but if you can run sub 19 mins you can enter, we're not excluding anyone". For 2 years running I argued my point (not continuously, but for the 2 years they were being unfair). They don't do it anymore so it's a moot point.

It's true it's harder for male runners, but as well as trying to get more of a gender balance, it's also just a fact that absolutely LOADS of men can run a 40-minute 10k and a 3:15ish marathon. If they let them all in, the race would be absolutely rammed with people trying to run the same pace and your husband would have had a crap time trying to jostle his way through. As things stand (I've run it in times between 2:50 and 320) if you do get in at those paces, you stand a good chance of a PB on a fast course.

God you’re a dick aren’t you.

Some people just don’t go that fast. I should be a hell of a lot faster at marathons- my 5k pb is 27mins, 10k is 58 and half is 2:09. But my fastest time for a marathon has been 5:28. A friend of mine who does many marathons and ultras, her fastest marathon time js 5:26. She ran on Sunday- 7:30. We’ve all trained, I paid a coach once, £70 per month for marathon training and I worked my butt off, came in in around 5:40. Some of us do the training and just don’t go that quickly. Many people could walk it in 8 hours but many people don’t, and can’t- it’s hardly difficult to understand.

But you’re right in that people should take their places seriously and train properly for it. But would you say the same for the people who don’t do any training and pull out a 4:30 marathon? Because there’s quite a few of them too. Is it just the slow ones who haven’t trained who you don’t like?

You don’t know that those walking got a ballet place. Some/many runners rely on charity places to be able to take part.

Lots of the competitors are injured or unwell in the build up and do not have enough stamina to run or run it all. Instead, they still take part and walk parts of it whilst raising thousands of pounds for charity.

It’s not awful! Many of those 20,000 runners will be doing exactly what you want - deferring because they’ve not trained or are injured and aren’t race ready. You’ll find the faster runners get the more likely they are to DNS if they know they aren’t in shape, but maybe at your end of the field people just turn up whatever.

That was in response to the 20,000 no shows.

It's things like this that make non runners not want to get into it.

It’s not ‘harder’ for male runners @Noseylittlemoo its proportionally the same!

It definitely is harder for male runners! And I say this as a female runner who would love to claim that I'm just amazing. I've run several times from the championship start, where the female qualifying time used to be 3:15 and the male qualifying time 245. The issue is that there are more male runners at the faster end of the field. If you look at women's finish times, there's a big gap between a handful of elites, then a handful of sub-elite (say, either side of three hours) runners, then a big gap before you get a larger amount of decent runners. That means you can make the qualifying time for women relatively achievable because the numbers qualifying will still be pretty negligible. There are women in their 50s and 60s in the champs start pen - not so many men.

For male runners, the finish times don't look like that really - there are lots of decent standard runners and less of a gap between standards, so if you had an equivalently challenging (or not) qualifying time, hundreds would qualify and they couldn't all be accommodated.

Re. harder for men/women, a couple more thoughts:

• it's not even proportional, I believe you still get fewer women qualifying.
• if you put the qualifying times into the WAVA age-grading calculator, the male times do come out harder:

I agree it's harder for men to get gfa times.
At our running club only a few men got gfa places (and they are only the ones that regularly get podium or top 10 finishes in other races) whereas there are lots of women qualifying, of all ages, not just the top ones.
Im pretty sure the natural advantage men have is about 11% but if you look at the qualifying gfa times for male v50 and female v50 the difference is over 20%.

But as a pp has said I think it's to balance the number of participants

imagine being this ableist plus you aren't on the panel where rules are decided therefore your opinion means nothing, you just sound like you're annoyed that they got the chance and you didn't

I will one day be one of those people doing it in 8 hours I did a half marathon in 5 , finishing the half marathon was a life changing event for me in so many ways , I'm still fat and slow but I took part in something amazing and one day I will take part in the marathon as will you
You do you
Train as hard as you like
I will change and challenge myself my way