A Belated Look Back At A Wonderful Boston Marathon 2010 Experience

Life and work in the weeks prior to and following the Boston Marathon this year — my first Boston Marathon — were so busy I had little time, until the last few days, for the dreaded taper madness, or subsequently, to write the long, reflective blog post that’s followed my other races.  That doesn’t, however mean that the running of this race was overshadowed in my mind or imagination.  This was a big deal for me, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to have run it.  Here, almost three weeks later, are a few belated observations.

Two days before Boston I went down to the expo to pick up my number. It was a cold, gray, rainy day. And while I’ve said that I was too busy for much of the taper madness this year, I didn’t escape it entirely.  The last five days or so were filled with the phantom pains and burgeoning physical and mental anxiety that accompany the sudden decrease in peak mileage.  And by expo day I was fully succumbed.  I plodded across the Common in the drizzle, feeling stout, bloated and puffy, achy as though I’d aged forty years in a week.  All around me city runners dashed as lithe and graceful as gazelles in their youthful (even if they were old), cosmopolitan fitness. I was too resigned to my own status to even be intimidated. I was an impostor.  Run a marathon?  I’d be hard pressed to walk the mile to Hynes Convention Center and back.  That was how I felt. But I knew some things, too. I knew what I had done in training, each tempo run, long run, speed run, recovery run. I knew I was in the best shape I’d ever been in, and if that still wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be, and if my body felt a wreck on that Saturday morning, what of it.  Feelings are nice, but they’re fickle, and they succumb easily to taper madness. You train on intellect and run on will. I went on over to the expo and got my number, the whole time twisted a little with this mix of pleasant anticipation and diffident anxiety.  This nervousness swelled the rest of the weekend and finally burst into delighted anticipation Sunday night.  Monday morning I awoke at 4:15, before the alarm went off, and I felt ready to run.

At the expo

I remember now and assume I’ll remember 40 years from now, a great many things vividly about the day.  The weather was perfect.  Chilly, with blue skies and little wind.  Kris drove Gary, Curt and me down, and on the way, Gary called the WZID radio station to tell the DJ how Curt was nervous because he was worried his wife Danielle might go into labor before the race was over.  The DJs put the call on the air a few minutes later and made many fine jokes about this.  It came up a lot throughout the morning. But the fact that people seemed a bit surprised that Curt and Danielle were both planning to be in Boston this many days past the due date, but were not greatly surprised by it, underscored how seriously folks take Boston around here.

Gary calls the radio station while Curt looks on

Kris dropped us off at one of the roadblocks in Hopkinton before heading to the T station to meet Danielle and take the train downtown. We hiked into town with hundreds of other runners, and like at all races we run in New England, we immediately ran into people we knew. People from Manchester; from our own track club even.  Despite the fact that we’d not prearranged it, or that 26,000 people strong were gathering for the race.  A town the size of Merrimack, New Hampshire, had turned out to run.  We readied at a high school classmate’s house a few blocks from the start – she’d learned I was running Boston on Facebook and offered us a staging area. She and her husband welcome many runners into their place race morning, and it was a companionable place to finish getting one’s self together.  Nice to have a couple of bathrooms free, as well.  The port-a-potty lines at the athlete’s village were significant.

It’s hard to explain exactly what it was like to be in that great mass of people making its way to the starting corrals in Hopkinton.  Like a massive carnival, or maybe the Carnival or Mardi Gras, or being in an army massing on a battlefield for a foot charge, or shuddering with adrenalin in the crowd just before they let the bulls free in Pamplona.  Like all of those things and none of them, because this was a quintessential little New England town on a quintessential New England spring day.  And as Curt and I bid Gary farewell and found our way into corral 6, right in front of the Hopkinton town hall, and the military jets screamed above us in a precision flyover, and the loudspeaker blared and the people around us threw off their sweatshirts and shook out their arms preparing to run, it felt big, but old and somehow comforting at the same time.

The gun goes off and you don’t move at first. There were about five thousand people in front of us.  Then we began to walk, then pick up speed.  And like one of those movies about medieval armies meeting on the field, we began to trot, then jog, then finally, just before the starting line, run. I crossed the start at somewhere around a 7:10 per mile pace and held that give or take five seconds, for the next 17 miles, through crowds as loud and exuberant and continuous as you find lining a parade route.  I ran steadily and tried to hold my line and not waste energy. Though I drank in all of the sights, the crowds, the signs, the costumed characters, the storied landmarks, I didn’t swerve or high five people as I went by them. I ran my race as smartly as I could. At mile 16, I didn’t feel as though I’d started breathing hard. I felt strong and very much in control.

Shortly after mile 17, I ran into the first of the more serious hills in the race, and that and the subsequent three, took all of that strength and control and crumpled them like tissue paper.  I came out of the hills struggling to hold not my planned race pace, but something much slower. The last two hills had been infinitely horrid struggles to get up and they’d cracked my pace to pieces.  Down the third hill, I’d tried to come back up to my original race pace, and felt muscle spasms shoot down both legs as quads and calves protested. I slowed down ten seconds a mile and it eased.  But my beyond the tight muscles, the shuddering quads, my strength was gone and my heartrate had gone through the roof. I’d come at the hills all wrong, and now I was entirely red-lined with five miles left to run.  I walked through the next water stop, 15 or 20 seconds, trying to recalibrate. I ran again and was still going by people, but there were many more passing me as well, now.

I ran the last five miles in a haze of white mist and exhaustion.  By the last three, I felt as though I wanted to stop every step, and that I couldn’t run a single step more. The roar of the crowd was a cacophony now, an assault, but it helped to drown out the sound of my pulse in my ears. The brief dip into the tunnel under the highway just before the end brought a few moments of blessed silence.  I was tired all over my body by the time I came around the corner onto Boylston Street. Some people say that the sight of the crowd there, the finish line far down the straight, gives you a shot of adrenalin and you just sail to the finish.  That didn’t happen to me.  I just wondered how it could still be so far away, how I was possibly going to get across all that pavement. My arms hurt. My neck hurt so that I couldn’t turn my head without feeling as though it would cramp. I could feel my head hanging back, almost dangling on that exhausted neck.  I heard Kris scream and saw her lean out of the crowd to take a picture. I tried to smile at her, but I’m afraid it may have looked like a grimace.

A brutal final stretch

That last stretch went on forever.  Then I crossed the line.  And stopped my watch. And stopped running.  And that felt as wonderful as anything has ever felt. To stand swaying and then to walk, staggering, into that sea of volunteers to be wrapped in a space blanket and fed energy drinks and bananas and salty white potato chips.  But mostly just not to be running anymore.  I met Kristen, Curt (who’d finished something more than 10 minutes ahead of me) and Danielle (who’d happily not gone into labor yet) and we walked around Boston (albeit on stiff and aching legs) an hour, then took the T back to pick up the cars. We ate lunch at the Cheesecake Factory and a tall Sam Adams Noble Pils has never tasted so good.

Ahhh, celebration!

I ran Boston in 3:12:49.  This was 2:49 slower than I’d hoped for, but still better than my best time, last October which was 3:13:21 at the Baystate Marathon in Lowell – my Boston Marathon Qualifying Time.  Given that Baystate is flat and fast, and Boston is challenging with a miles long opening downhill stretch to tear up your quads and then a four-mile stretch from miles 17-21 with four hills to climb, thrashing your legs the other way, I felt pretty good about the improvement.  In fact, I was pretty euphoric the whole way home. And for days after. I sure didn’t feel like I had something to make up for.

And I wasn’t planning on running another marathon until at least the fall.  But sometimes opportunities come along that are to good to pass up.  Like when a friend offers you the chance to run wearing his company’s logo at the Vermont City Marathon on May 30, and that’s just six weeks after you ran Boston.  You think for a moment that prudence dictates you pass.  But then you think about how wonderful the marathon is, even the awful, hurting parts, and how you’ve already gone to all the trouble of training all winter to get in marathon shape and so why not get two races in on that base, and you say, if all goes well with a six week recovery, re-training and re-tapering, maybe that 3:10 marathon is somewhere north of Boston in my old home state. Or maybe I’ll set my goal a little easier for this follow up run.  Either way, still happy just to be running.  See you in Burlington, friends.

If you’re looking for something to read between now and then, here’s a link to my column on marathoning that appeared in The Telegraph on Boston Marathon morning.

NOTE: Curt and Danielle’s baby was born the Friday after the marathon, and mom, dad and little Ethan Miles are all the pictures of joy and health!

Tags: Boston Marathon, marathon, Running, vermont city marathon

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• May 31, 2010 -- Second marathon in six weeks is a fun one; Vermont City Marathon is a fantastic event in a great city!
• April 17, 2010 -- Picking up bib #6500, Boston Marathon
• February 24, 2010 -- Half at the Hamptons Marks Halfway Point in Boston Training; 5 Winter Marathon Training Lessons