About 20 percent of the 30,000 runners in the Boston Marathon earned their entry by raising money for charity, but nearly all of the others had to qualify with times that classified them in the upper tier of runners in their age groups.
For the lay marathoner, qualifying for Boston is a crowning achievement. It’s also an opportunity to run a monster of a course that goes mostly downhill for the first 16 miles, deceptively shredding the quadriceps muscles, and then travels uphill for most of the next five. At the top of Heartbreak Hill in Mile 20 of the race, the Citgo sign outside Fenway Park, roughly a mile from the finish, comes into view.