London Marathon Joins Boston in Welcoming Nonbinary Runners

The conversations around inclusion led Fedorowski to create a collection of resources for runners and race organizers, including a database of races with nonbinary fields. By the beginning of this week, it included 228 races in the United States and 20 internationally.

The Boston Marathon’s new nonbinary division carries further significance because it includes qualifying standards. Many runners spend months, if not years, trying to hit Boston’s rigorous qualifying standards, which are based on age and gender. It’s the gold standard of marathon qualifying times.

To register for a slot in the Boston Marathon, women ages 18 to 34 must have run another marathon in 3 hours 30 minutes, and men ages 18 to 34 must meet a time standard of 3 hours. (The qualifying times increase as runners get older.)

When determining the qualifying times for nonbinary runners, Boston organizers said they tried to be transparent in the process, based on conversations with Calamia, Fedorowski and other nonbinary athletes. “We didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, we can’t do this in 2023, we’re not ready because we don’t have the data yet,’” Jack Fleming, the acting chief executive of the Boston Athletic Association, said.

Instead, the organizers announced they would use the existing qualifying times for women as the standard for the nonbinary division, with plans to update the nonbinary qualifying times for future races as they collect more data.

Even with the nonbinary division established and the qualifying times laid out, more details would still need to be settled, runners said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/sports/boston-nonbinary-runners-marathon.html