These are all good points. There does appear to be some "marathon mania" but remember that lottery applicants don't have to have any prior finish times that would suggest they could get into Boston. A huge number of lottery applicants says nothing directly about qualified applicants to Boston. Nonetheless, London is one of the top feeders to Boston and so I am currently working on a refinement to my analysis that will take better accounting for international qualifiers. Thank you for your comment!