Qualifying for NY, Part 1: short distances

This November I'm going to run my first marathon: New York City. I was born and raised here in New York, so I'm pretty excited about it.

There are a number of ways to get into the New York Marathon. One of them (the way I did it) is to run 9 "qualifying races" with the New York Road Runners. This sounds pretty impressive, but there are a lot of races that count as qualifiers, and they vary in distance.

Recently, I started to wonder what the shortest amount of distance is that a person can run, and still qualify for New York. Here's are some races:

[1] 1 mile Fifth Avenue Mile
[2] 3.1 miles Coogan's Salsa, Blues, and Shamrocks
[3] 3.1 miles Amer. Heart Assoc. Wall St. Run
[4] 4.0 miles NYRR Gridiron Classic
[5] 4.0 miles NYRR Al Gordon Snowflake
[6] 4.0 miles Run as One, TGL Classic
[7] 4.0 miles NY Colon Cancer Challenge
[8] 4.0 miles Run as One
[9] 4.0 miles Run for the Parks

(I think there are also various other 4 mile races.)

So that's 31.2 miles, which is only 5 miles more than a single marathon. Not that much distance.