It is a fool’s errand to try to tell, or even count, all of
the stories from even one year of the Boston Marathon. I am but 1 of 30000 to
toe the start line in Hopkinton. I could never share every story from the road
that brought me to that line and even to try to document each step between
Hopkinton and Boston would be impossible. If I were to condense this year’s
Boston marathon into a single line it would be this: the most painful start; the
least painful finish.
Most definitely, this was one of the very rare occasions
that I was happy at the finish line. Cold? Certainly. Hungry? Most definitely. But
despite the normal discomfort of a marathon I was happy. The last time I can
recall being happy when I crossed a finish line was September 30th of 2006.
Back then I was no less a runner than I am today. Anyone who pins on a number
or laces up a pair of trainers heads out the front door for a run is a runner
and there are no distinctions among us but back then had many fewer miles on
the clock. It was my fourth year of running, my fourth marathon, and my fourth
race. I was coming off of a 4:12:00 performance at the New Hampshire Marathon
in Bristol the year before and had spent the past year in what was then my
typical fashion: forgetting about running the day after the New Hampshire
Marathon until about a month before the next year’s race.
 |
| I have no recollection whatsoever as to whom the photo credit belongs for this one. Statute of limitations? |
I ran as fast as I ever had at the Feaster 5 and managed to
come in only 301 places after the winner. While I was amazed with myself for
running faster than an 8:00min/mile pace I was even more humbled by learning
that a not only was a 7:30 pace for a 5 mile race not a fast time it meant the
winner finished around the time I was passing the three mile mark. After that
race it was almost 9 years and 190 race finishes and 194 race starts before I
got back the feeling I had when I finished the last of my 4 tries at the New
Hampshire marathon.
It probably all comes down to pre-race expectations. In 2006
I still didn’t have a training log or even a watch. I was running in my
walking-around sneakers and had no idea what a good time was for any distance
so when I ran a 3:33:00 all I knew was that it was 39 minutes faster than I had
run the year before. This year I didn’t even know if I would be able to start
the race until April 15th when I visited the doctor to have the stitches taken
out of my chin and have my left ear checked out (which still had not recovered
its hearing from the injury on the 6th).
On the morning of the race Sarah, Ron and Ann dropped me off
about a mile and a half from the Athlete’s Village just as the first drops of
rain were falling. I had brought a trash bag which I put on as a precaution
against the heavier rain that wasn’t far behind. Standing around the edge of
the tent in the Athlete’s Village was frigid and my teeth started chattering.
This would not typically be a problem but since it is still very painful to try
to close my jaw the chattering was excruciating. My stomach hurt too; I knew
that by being off of solid foods for the better half of the last two weeks of
training, I had gotten my nutrition all wrong. I just wanted the race to start
so that I could try to ignore the pain in my head and stomach. One way or
another the race would be over for me and I could get warm.
Eventually they called out corral 6 to go to the start line
and I went with everyone else. I saw TR working the corrals and said hi which
gave me a boost but then it was back to more waiting around to start. After
some time the race started. The start of the Boston Marathon is one of the
least climactic events in the world of running if you’re stacked up at the back
of a wave. There are some announcements and then perhaps there is some
excitement off the line out at the front but buried over 5000 deep into the
pack at the start you wait. Then you wait some more before walking forward
maybe 50 meters where you come to a stop again for just a little more waiting.
Then you start walking again. Some people around you will start pantomiming a
running cadence but due to the crush of humanity about they don’t more any
faster than your shuffle.
It was somewhere around two and a half or three minutes into
the race when I came to the line and started my Garmin. Even there it was slow
going; it was almost a hundred meters before I felt like I was up to some
semblance of marathon pace. The early miles of the Boston Marathon can be
demoralizing. Though I lined up about 5200 places back into a 7500 runner
corral, it seemed like a thousand or more runners streamed past me before I
reached the first 5km marker. If I passed anyone I didn’t notice. I told myself
that the next 5km would be stronger but dared not push the pace much due to the
hammering in my left ear with each step.
When I went through the 10km mark I saw that I was just
around the pace I wanted. My plan had been to run the first 10km in roughly 43
minutes since that was approximately one minute per mile slower than I had run
at the Malden Rotary 10km three weeks earlier. If I could do that I would
decide if had the legs under me to go after a sub- 3 or if I needed to back off
and just try to survive the jog to Boston. The 43 minute 10km would have put me
on pace for something like a 3:01:35 which admittedly was quite a bit more
aggressive than my official goal of just getting across the finish line in one
piece. Not only was that pace ahead of what my running math said I could do but
a bit quicker than the average pace from my 3:02:47 PR.
 |
| One of the many tabs in my running log is for fitting data from races and/or training runs. The PR plot is mostly for fun; the analysis of recent racing and training is more useful in general but this time underestimated how I would do at Boston this year. I think that including the Seoul Marathon as a race effort in the calculation even though it was intended to be more of a training run weighted the math towards a slower time. My other PRs suggest that I should be capable of running a marathon PR in 2:57:45 to 3:00:23 but my more recent racing (last 12 months’ worth of data) said that I should only have been targeting a 3:08:58. |
I made it to the 10km mark just a little bit behind my 43
minute target but I still couldn’t guess how I was going to hold up. My body
hadn’t really warmed up yet so I kept my long sleeve shirt on over my singlet
and decided that I would kick the decision about my race strategy down the road
and make the call when I ditched the long-sleeves at the 15km mark. The rain
really started to come in earnest as I went under the gantry at 15km and I delayed
deciding about the shirt and the race again. I’d make the decision at the half
way mark, I told myself. At the half I was still too cold so I decided again to
wait around at the same pace.
 |
| Photo by Richard Blake from Coolrunning. This is one of the few pictures of me on the course because the shirt I planned to throw away at the start hid my GLRR singlet and obscured my bib number for the official pictures. |
Not long before the 25km mark I could tell that there was a
problem. The stomach pain that I had started the race with had become almost
unbearable and it felt like my throat was closing down with phlegm. There were
a set of port-a-johns just past the 15 mile mark and I pulled off course. I
tried to use the restroom to fix my stomach but it was no benefit. Almost as
soon as I stepped back onto the road I had to pull off again and throw up. The
whole experience of pulling off course probably only cost me about a minute but
I hadn’t been looking at my watch so I just presumed that it had cost me my
race.
I gave up on 3 hours or qualifying and just put my head down
and started the death-march that I usually need to settle into around 30km. At
mile 16 I started telling myself: “It’s just another 10 mile jog. Don’t look at
the other runners, just keep your legs moving.” At the Wicked Running Club
station at mile 17 I heard someone shout my name. It was Tim Short. I pumped a
fist weakly in reply but his shout had brought my head up and I noticed that
rather than falling back in the pack I had been passing people. Feeling a
little energized, I settled back into a racing form and tried to prepare my
mind for the big hills ahead. Without Tim’s shout I most likely would have
ended up walking within the next few miles.
As I worked my way through the hills of Newton I constantly
reminded myself to hold back. I don’t always talk to myself while racing, but
this year I couldn’t seem to shut myself up: "don’t spend it all on this hill;
the big one is still somewhere up the road." Then I was coasting out of Newton
without having really taken much notice of the hills but with the downhill and
my longer stride I was really starting to move up through the pack. Some were
walking; others were jogging but no one else appeared to still be racing. When
I got to mile 23 I looked at my watch and was amazed to see that I still had a
chance to hit my qualifying time if I could just hold my pace.
Somewhere between 23 and 24 the course flattened out and the
rain was starting to pool on the road. With about 400 miles and multiple
flights across the Pacific in the belly of a 747 there was little tread left to
my soles and my steps started to hydroplane. I was a little nervous because I
didn’t want a repeat of the recent head injury but I also don’t believe in
living timidly so the mantra I switched to under my breath was: “Don’t let it
cost you the qualifier” and “Hold the pace” and I told myself there would be
soup at the finish. I knew it was a lie but I didn’t care; the prospect of hot
soup kept me moving. From some distant place in my mind I recognized how
strange that I wanted soup so much. At the end of the Maine Coast Marathon my
biggest disappointment had been that the coffee jugs were full of soup and I
had to settle for a cup of soup instead a cup of coffee. I didn’t care. I
wanted a blanket and that imaginary soup.
As I came into Boston the Five College Realtors 10 Miler shirt was
sitting heavily both on my shoulders and on my mind. I wanted to cross the
finish with my Greater Lowell Road Runners singlet out but I also didn’t want
to try to pull the shirt off in traffic. My left shoulder didn’t have its
normal range of motion due to the tetanus shot I had been given recently so I
knew that I needed to come to a full stop and bend over almost enough to touch
my toes just to get the shirt off. As I passed mile 25, I decided it was time.
I pulled off, stopped and bent over. The crowd took noticed and the air was
full of shouts not to stop with the finish so close. As soon as the shirt was
off and I was back on the course surging past the runners around me the cheers
changed from the normal “Almost there,” and “Good job, keep going,” to much
more enthusiastic “Go Lowell!” Lifted by the cheers, I surged again and turned
my focus to getting to the finish in under 3:05:00 which I knew had been pushed
a little farther out of reach by stopping to ditch the shirt.
I did
not look at my watch once I hit Boylston Street and didn’t know the actual time
difference between my start and the race start so when I finished I still
didn’t know if I had qualified. Here are my splits, all are approximate because
the GPS measures long; it had the course at 26.4 miles which is surprisingly
close to the actual course distance of 26.22:
|
Distance
|
Mile
|
Time
|
Net Time
|
Avg Pace
|
Projected
Finish
|
|
1
|
1
|
0:07:18
|
0:07:18
|
07:18.0
|
3:11:24
|
|
2
|
1
|
0:07:03
|
0:14:21
|
07:10.5
|
3:08:08
|
|
3
|
1
|
0:06:51
|
0:21:12
|
07:04.0
|
3:05:17
|
|
4
|
1
|
0:06:50
|
0:28:02
|
07:00.5
|
3:03:46
|
|
5
|
1
|
0:07:01
|
0:35:03
|
07:00.6
|
3:03:48
|
|
6
|
1
|
0:06:39
|
0:41:42
|
06:57.0
|
3:02:14
|
|
7
|
1
|
0:06:41
|
0:48:23
|
06:54.7
|
3:01:14
|
|
8
|
1
|
0:06:48
|
0:55:11
|
06:53.9
|
3:00:52
|
|
9
|
1
|
0:06:44
|
1:01:55
|
06:52.8
|
3:00:23
|
|
10
|
1
|
0:06:51
|
1:08:46
|
06:52.6
|
3:00:18
|
|
11
|
1
|
0:06:51
|
1:15:37
|
06:52.5
|
3:00:15
|
|
12
|
1
|
0:06:46
|
1:22:23
|
06:51.9
|
3:00:00
|
|
13
|
1
|
0:06:52
|
1:29:15
|
06:51.9
|
3:00:01
|
|
14
|
1
|
0:06:56
|
1:36:11
|
06:52.2
|
3:00:08
|
|
15
|
1
|
0:06:59
|
1:43:10
|
06:52.7
|
3:00:20
|
|
16
|
1
|
0:08:00
|
1:51:10
|
06:56.9
|
3:02:10
|
|
17
|
1
|
0:07:04
|
1:58:14
|
06:57.3
|
3:02:21
|
|
18
|
1
|
0:07:04
|
2:05:18
|
06:57.7
|
3:02:31
|
|
19
|
1
|
0:06:54
|
2:12:12
|
06:57.5
|
3:02:26
|
|
20
|
1
|
0:07:02
|
2:19:14
|
06:57.7
|
3:02:32
|
|
21
|
1
|
0:07:12
|
2:26:26
|
06:58.4
|
3:02:50
|
|
22
|
1
|
0:06:40
|
2:33:06
|
06:57.5
|
3:02:28
|
|
23
|
1
|
0:06:55
|
2:40:01
|
06:57.4
|
3:02:25
|
|
24
|
1
|
0:06:55
|
2:46:56
|
06:57.3
|
3:02:22
|
|
25
|
1
|
0:07:05
|
2:54:01
|
06:57.6
|
3:02:31
|
|
26
|
1
|
0:07:24
|
3:01:25
|
06:58.7
|
3:02:57
|
|
26.22
|
0.22*
|
0:02:44
|
3:04:09
|
07:01.4
|
3:04:09
|
After the finish I met Mark at the family meeting area first
and then Sarah arrived with my dry clothes. We rushed to the T so I could get
changed and get a coffee. Then it was home to celebrate with pasta.
 |
As usual, I owe my
ability to finish to Sarah. Sarah held everything together when I was stuck in
bed on pain killers and deaf in both ears and put me back together and got me
healthy not just enough to think about racing but to finish 3 seconds per mile
off of my PR despite the rain and headwind.
|
The race was cold and uncomfortable and I was in serious
pain at the start but I was walking fine at the finish and had none of the
sunburns that I took home as souvenirs from last year’s race and I had beat my
expectations so I was happy even though there was no soup. Recovery was a 6
miler on Tuesday and an 8 miler on Wednesday, both around 7:30 pace before
catching the 6am flight out of Boston to Seoul, Korea by way of SFO.
I’m happy with 3:04:09 at Boston this year (compared to
3:18:12 at Boston last year and 3:13:31 at the Seoul Marathon last month) but I
don’t know how it will hold up when it comes time to register next fall. You
can bet that I’ve got another marathon in me between now and when Sarah and I
go to France to enjoy the wine tour disguised as a marathon known as Marathon
du Medoc. I'm not going to let that 3:02:47 PR sit around for long.
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