(Slow) Road to Boston

April 20, 2017

I've gotten into a pretty healthy running habit so far this year, and similarly, I’ve developed a pretty standard routine with my writing. I’ve gotten in the habit of posting to the blog once per week, usually on Thursday, which gives me the first half of the week to plan and outline.

Some weeks I know well in advance what I’m going to write, other weeks I sort of wing it when I sit down to draft the post on Wednesday night. Since my friends and I typically host our weekly run club on Monday nights, that short run offers an excellent opportunity for me to rummage through a few ideas in my head and start to brainstorm a theme or even an outline for my post.

So, this past Monday, as I set out on my run, I let my mind wander and I immediately settled on my naked wrist. After the strap on my Garmin broke over the weekend, I'm stuck without my watch while I wait for the replacement band in the mail.

I became hyper-aware of how unusual I felt running without such a simple piece of equipment and immediately started outlining a post about the importance of the occasional "naked" run, without any electronics or unnecessary gadgets.

As I cooled down at the Oyster Bay Brewing Company's bar after my run though, something happened that abruptly changed my direction. Right as I was getting ready to leave, I saw someone walk in who had a familiar hobble in his step. It was the hobble of someone who'd just run a race and was feeling the aftereffects.

As he walked passed me, my eyes caught something else familiar on his jacket, the iconic Boston Athletic Association unicorn. I'd followed the race all morning but never expected a finisher to walk into a Long Island brewery the night of the race!

I couldn't help but ask so I waited for him to come back my way, and sure enough, he'd just finished his third Boston Marathon. I asked him about the race, his training, his past races, and pretty much everything I could think of.

He was so casual and nonchalant about running arguably the most renowned race on the planet, I couldn't believe it, and then he asked me one simple question. "When am I going to see you at the race?"

There was one day a few years ago, I was working in Boston for the summer, and I'd had an idea. One day, I'd love to run the Boston Marathon. I'd never even run a marathon, still haven't, but running through the streets of Boston, I couldn't help but dream. Then I looked up the qualifying times.

For 2018, the qualifying time for my age group (18-34) is 3:05 which is just over a 7-minute mile. I very quickly set my sites on much lower goals, maybe New York one day! But as I sat talking to this Boston finisher, I felt the same drive, the same inspiration, and the same curiosity start to creep up inside.

Then he told me that he never thought he'd qualify for Boston either. He chose a year to really chase it, and couldn't believe it when he made it. Then he told me "Once I qualified for the first time, the second and third were easy because I'd already done it."

When I first started running in high school, running further than 5k was out of the question. I pushed myself through my first half, and it was brutal, but I made it, and my time wasn't half bad. Now training for a half seems like clockwork, and I've even made it through a race or two without much training at all.

Driving home from the bar, I couldn't stop thinking about trying to qualify for Boston, and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to write the same post I'd started writing on my run just earlier that night. I knew I had to commit to Boston if I ever wanted to qualify.

UPDATE: I've officially registered for my first marathon!

So that's what I'm doing. This is me committing to all of you that I'm going to run the Boston Marathon. Now it's definitely not going to be a quick process, I still haven't even run a marathon. It's time to start taking baby steps though so I think it's time to pick my first full.

Who knows, maybe I'll change it up at Rock 'n' Roll New Orleans this year and make that my first one! I know this is all pretty vague, but give me a break, I just made this decision on Monday!