Good points. Unfortunately, I really have no way of estimating how the 150th anniversary of the battle or how Easter Monday affects would affect the application rate. My only relevant observation is that these events don't seem to have impacted anyone's desire to earn a BQ. The number of BQ's just keeps going up. I have to think then that the majority of runners don't really care about these sideshows.

I didn't include any speculation on runners' "psyches" either because that also is hard to quantify. However, I probably should have included a comparison set of graphs showing the histogram distribution of cutoff margins from 2024 and that of my sample set for 2025. That comparison shows a slight movement towards faster BQ finishes for 2025 compared to 2024. But that shift is also part of my latest cutoff estimate.