Boston Marathon registration opens for fastest qualifiers – how quickly will it sell out?

The Boston Athletic Association opens its registration at 10 a.m. ET for the fastest qualifiers of the 2014 Boston Marathon. The first wave of registration is open to those who ran 20 minutes or more faster than their qualifying time.

In there’s still space available, the second wave opens on Wednesday, Sept. 11 (also at 10 a.m. ET) for runners who have exceeded the qualifying standard by 10 minutes or more.

The third wave launches on Friday, Sept. 13 for anyone who topped their qualifying standard by 5 minutes or more.

On Monday, Sept. 16, registration begins for all qualified runners and stayed open until the race hits its 36,000 field capacity.

The rolling registration policy, which included tighter qualification standards, was implemented after the 2011 Boston Marathon sold out in just over 8 hours, shutting out many of the fastest qualifiers.

The Boston Athletic Association announced last month that the race field would increase by 9,000 to 36,000 runners, but some people still think the race could sell out as early as Wednesday, Sept. 11. If that happens, it could lead to an interesting race field split between very fast qualified runners (and elites, of course) and thousands of charity runners, shutting out some runners who hit their qualification standard, but didn’t run quite fast enough to register in an earlier wave.