'We need to do better,' BAA says after meeting with Black Marathon spectators who say they were bottled up by police in Newton

Next year, when you see that all of the areas that would normally have rope barriers, now have metal barriers, you will know why.

Jumping onto the course is a real nuisance. I’ve seen well meaning spectators knock over actual marathoners by trying to cheer on their friends. Not cool!

… especially if you are told to do so. I ran through and was nearly "hit" by the confetti cannon (given the history in Boston, maybe cannons of any kind aren't a great idea) but it seems like the real issue was people on the course. Had I been impeded by a group of 10 people running with a banner I probably would have had some choice words myself! That said, I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the people cheering there and elsewhere on the course.

A few thoughts on this:

* Everyone in large groups pushes onto the course a little bit at times. Your friend comes along and you lean out to give a high five, and maybe don't wind up as far back as you had been. Rinse, repeat. So eventually cops walk up and down the course all along the way asking people to move back, and generally people do. Not ill will. People move back. It's fine. If the cops wound up in a line with bikes, it likely was after several times asking nicely to stay off the course.

* There's probably less leeway on Heartbreak Hill, too. Newton is a great place to have a cheer party because you can stake out ground on the old streetcar reservation on Comm Ave and set up chairs, a grill, tents, coolers, etc and have a party on public right-of-way which abuts the course. There is a lot of looking the other way that goes on (grills are probably not de jure allowed, adult beverages definitely not, but as long as everyone is behaved, no one seems to have an issue). But setting up on Heartbreak means that there might be a bit more scrutiny since it's arguably the most famous part of the course. With thick crowds, and probably several BAA officials. And also the one where the most people struggle.

* Don't run on the course without a number. But if you do, don't make it obvious. If one person jumps in the race and runs alongside a friend for a couple hundred feet on a flat section, no one is going to notice. If you need to cross the course, just jump into the race and run a few hundred feet diagonally across with the runners. This is easier as the race goes on. For runners in the 2:30 to 3:45 finish time (so, say, 11:45 to 1:00 in Newton) this is trickier, it's the densest part of the race and runners are moving pretty quickly. The rest of the day, use some discretion. One person running along isn't going to cause much of an issue. 10 people holding banners with a photographer? Yeah, that is going to raise some eyebrows. Given the carriage road parallels, you can cheer, then run, then cheer, then run, then cheer, running in parallel to your runner for miles. If you can keep up.

* What about bandits? People always used to run the course without numbers. What changed?

Two things.

1. 2013.

2. The race has gotten a lot bigger over the years. Up until the mid-1960s, there were only about 200 runners in the race. (Basically, outside of a few weirdos running wasn't a thing, especially for women.) The the running boom comes along and by 1979 there are 6000 to 9000 entrants each year. The BAA drops the qualifying time down and entries stagnate around 6000 for the next decade, then slowly increase as the BAA loosens qualifying times. 36000 people run the 100th marathon (all comers accepted) which seems all the more impressive given that it was quadruple the size of any previous Boston and they must have been guessing at logistics.

Back to 10,000 in 1997 and then slowly climbing to 26000 in 2009, when the race sells out and times are tightened again (before then, you could run a qualifier in December or January and send in an application). The bigger 2014 race shows that 30,000 is about what Hopkinton and the narrow roadways can handle, and the race has been there ever since.

In the days of the bandits, the bandit runners were at the back of a much smaller field. There are more runners, and those runners are more concentrated than other races. Boston's median finish time is 3:42 with a 43 minute standard deviation. NYC and Chicago have median finish times in the 4:30 range with 1:00+ standard deviations. So even with larger fields, the peak finishing times for Boston with 300 to 400 runners per minute are as high as, or higher than, NYC or Chicago. On narrower streets (most of Chicago and NY are on four-lane-wide streets, or wider). And much faster: Boston peaks at just-below-3-hour finishers running nearly 10 mph, NYC and Chicago's peaks are with runners only going about 6 mph. So when you combine the most concentrated field with the runners' speed and the narrow roads, there's a lot less space than there used to be and than there is anywhere else.

2013 was a good excuse to end banditing, but the size of the race and the logistics of 30,000 runners as opposed to 6,000 means that it was probably on its way out for a while.

tl;dr don't jump on the course and this won't be a problem. I assume there will be metal fencing along Heartbreak next year and that might not actually be a terrible idea. There is already metal fencing in parts of Newton (at the Firehouse, for example) so why not here, too?