BOSTON — Kneeling in a tight crowd of thinly clad strangers afforded a crummy setting for introspection. Yet as my laces went double-knotted for the 114th time in a starting corral for the 114th Boston Marathon on the morning of April 19, I pondered distance and time.
Oddly, neither the 26.2-mile course ahead nor the hours required to cover it on foot immediately came to mind. Instead, I came to my feet among 23,070 fellow participants reflecting upon a much longer journey.
Twenty years ago, I was busy treating college like “Animal House.” I was as remote from a marathon as Bluto was the dean’s list at Faber. A few years later, I was just as busy treating life like “Animal House.” Only then, as I began to resemble Bluto, did I resort to something at which I was half-decent as a kid — a quick jog.
After a long and erratic progression of merely finishing, running and then racing merely 10Ks, half-marathons and then marathons, there I found myself in the rural town of Hopkinton, Mass., anxiously bustling toward the start line of the world’s premier running event.
The Boston Marathon is the Super Bowl of marathons. It’s America’s first and most celebrated; the inaugural was run in 1897. It’s among the world’s most difficult to enter; tough qualifying standards range from 3 hours, 10 minutes for an 18-year-old male to 5:30 for 80-plus females. And it’s a mass gathering of fanatics; talk here of bursitis (not what you want), fartlek (not what you think) and PRs (not what you claim) has a shot at attracting genuine interest.
Boston also is the Mardi Gras of marathons. Buoyed by a state holiday in Patriots’ Day and the spirits of ’76, onlookers lined both sides of the infamously challenging course — there’s a hill called “Heartbreak” and a mile called “Haunted” — for its entirety. That’s 52.4 miles of vocal support. And the some half-million spectators were mighty giving: cheers, yawps, high-fives, fist-bumps, beads, beer (there were takers).
The sensory contrast startled me. Marathon training demands a lot of alone time. Even some organized marathons go sparsely attended, if at all. This one in Boston, however, was a feast for peripheral vision. I digested every morsel like emotional Gu through eight cities and towns including Wellesley, where a seductive outcry rose from students advertising kisses outside the local liberal-arts college for women at Mile 12.5 (there were takers). The din at Wellesley College, akin to something Ulysses might’ve heard while nearing the Sirens, could be heard a quarter-mile in either direction.
The beck of the “Wellesley Scream Tunnel” paled only to the roar near the finish line in Boston’s Back Bay, where there’s a sharp left turn onto Boylston Street for a boisterous final quarter-mile. And at the finish line, I at long last overcame the inflammation in my heel (bursitis), reaped the benefits of speed-play workouts (fartlek) and achieved a personal record (PR) somewhere between overall winner Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot’s course-record 2:05:52 and actress Valerie Bertinelli’s 5:14:37.
Then there I was again, kneeling in a tight crowd — this one a little steamier than the last — in a contemplative mood.
No getting around it: Running is a solitary pastime. However, finishing a marathon — any marathon — is a team effort. While simultaneously adorning myself in a foil blanket and beginning to storyboard my personal “Man v. Food” episode at the nearest raw bar, I waxed grateful.
For a wife and two puppies who went without fences mended and Frisbees hurled during months of training. For truckers on lonely county roads who offered a wide berth. And for Pop, who bought my first pair of running shoes when I could still securely act my shoe size. Those blue-and-yellow Nikes with the patented waffle soles no longer fit, of course. They wear well, however, as one of the old man’s patented gentle reminders, which goes something like this.
“Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
Bryan Boyle is a Denver Post online sports producer. Contact: bboyle@denverpost.com
