As a college student in the city, I made running the Boston Marathon for a charity team a before-graduation goal. On April 16, 2007, I checked that goal off the list, and in the process caught the marathon bug. 4:25:31.…
It all started several years earlier when I read an article in one of the Boston newspapers about how patrons of The Happy Swallow bar in Framingham would cheer wildly for the first marathon runner to come off the course…
I ran the Chicago Marathon in 2001. My goal was to complete my first marathon in under four hours, but that day I crossed the finish line at 4:15. I was overwhelmed by such a large race atmosphere and was…
My wife had died four years earlier – just one month before the marathon which would have been our first. I had trained like crazy for about a year. A dearly loved aunt had flown to Houston to be with…
The slogan for the 2003 marathon was “Everything you ever needed to know about yourself you can learn in 26.2 miles.” I picked up a great poster with this slogan on it at the pre-race expo. This slogan has rung…
The Boston Marathon represented the end of a two year pursuit for me. In 2000, I set a goal to qualify for Boston and reached that goal in the Twin Cities Marathon that same year (a personal record of 3:09:52).…
The Boston Marathon is perhaps the definitive destination for distance runners. With its tough qualifying requirements, it is the goal to which countless runners aspire. As The Ultimate Guide to Marathons describes it, Boston is “the Mother of all Marathons,…
At noon a field of 15,606 runners left the Hopkinton starting line in the 105th Boston Marathon. I thus found myself among the third largest gathering in the event’s history, a field that included the last three men’s champions and…
There were so many memorable moments about my running of the 104th Boston Marathon I could write an entire volume. Boston is one of the best cities in the US and we loved it. We arrived at our Bed and…
In April of 2000 a relationship began. A runner fell in love with a city. Back in the summer of 1989, after doing some hiking in the Green Mountains, my cousin and I took in a Saturday afternoon game at…
What happens on the third Monday in April in Boston? Ask a Bostonian and they’ll say it’s Patriot’s Day. Ask any runner and they’ll tell you it’s the day of the Boston Marathon, the granddaddy of all marathons. One day…
My first Boston was in 1997. I had tried hard to qualify so I could run the 100th anniversary Boston Marathon in 1996. I did three marathons in December 1995, trying to qualify, and missed by several minutes each time.…