Bob Mann: 2019 Boston Marathon

On Mon Apr 15 2019, For me, this was the ultimate Good News/Bad News race. The Good News is that I ran the Boston Marathon this year! Which is awesome. The Bad News is that I ran the worst race of my life. The Even Worse News is that just a few days after the race, my wife Maggie suffered a stroke. She's been recovering very well, so the news isn't as bad as it could have been. But it has certainly caused a disruption in our lives and has taken priority over anything else. And thus this Race Report is quite delayed. Almost three months after the race, I am finally getting around to it. Since I'm usually much faster with the Report, my memory might be a little hazier than usual on the details. Plus, since I did so poorly, there might be some details that I am just choosing not to remember so well anyway.

So. Running the Boston Marathon is obviously a big deal. No, I didn't qualify. Even at my best, I wasn't fast enough to qualify for Boston. These days, I'm nowhere close. Aside from qualifying, the only other way to get in is to run for charity. As it happens, my undergraduate alma mater, Tufts University (which is right outside of Boston) has a charity team every year. I have been trying to get on the team for a number of years now. The majority of the spots are reserved for students, with only few slots each year going to alumni. This year I was finally chosen to be part of the team. My heartfelt thanks to team Coach Don Megerle for choosing me and letting me be part of the team this year.

My training hadn't been very good leading up to the race. Of course, that's been a consistent theme for me for a number of years now. I didn't think it was much worse than any of my other recent marathons. So I thought I was headed into this race okay. Perhaps the biggest question mark was that I had just run in Virginia Beach four weeks prior. Most runners who have completed as many marathons as I have would have no problem running two about a month apart. But I don't normally do them close together. I have definitely taken my time getting through the 50 states. And this has typically allowed me plenty of time to recover between races. I had figured that four weeks was enough time, but I wasn't absolutely sure.

The weather forecast looked iffy. There was a very good chance of rain. The Boston Marathon the previous year was held in quite a deluge. It wasn't supposed to be that bad this year. But the conditions weren't quite going to be ideal.

The race, as always, was on Patriot's Day, the third Monday of April, which is a state holiday in Massachusetts. I drove up to Boston on Sunday and grabbed my gear from the expo. Then I drove out to the Boston suburbs to stay with my friend Dan from college.

On Monday morning, Dan drove me to Tufts, where I met up with the rest of the marathon team. The school then bused us all to the Boston Common, where we met up with all the runners running the race. From there, we all got bused out to the start line in Hopkinton. So yes, it took me three vehicle trips to get to the start.

It had rained a lot overnight. By the start of the race, everything was wet, but it wasn't currently raining. The forecast called for it to actually briefly clear up in another couple hours before another rain storm rolled through. So it would be an interesting day, weather-wise. The most unpleasant portion leading up to the start was waiting around in a huge field of mud.

I understand that the logistics of a race with 30,000 runners is extremely complicated. Thus I understand why it required three vehicle rides to get me to Hopkinton. And I also understand that it might require a walk of about a mile to get from the athlete's village to the actual start point. I think I definitely got more steps in before I crossed the start line of this race than I had ever done before a marathon before. Nonetheless, I finally crossed the start line at 11:13am.

Initially my pace was fine. I cruised through the first three miles right around 9:30, which is right where I wanted to be. Mile 4 was done in 9:17, which turned out to be my fastest mile of the day. There was a bit of a hill over the next stretch, so the next two miles were in the 9:50 range. Then I got back to the 9:30s, and everything was moving along fine.

Then I got to Mile 10 and the wheels fell off. This is when the first storm had completely passed us by and the sun came out. That warmed things up a little. I have spoken frequently in previous Race Reports about how I do not like running marathons in the sun. But I've never been affected like this. I went from feeling fine to feeling quite awful very quickly. It took me 10:00 to complete that 10th mile, and I never got back under a 10:00 pace.

From this point on, I was plodding along. I made it to the halfway point in about 2:10. Typically I've been getting through the first half in around 2:07. Those three minutes might not seem like a big deal. But I could tell already by this point that I had nothing left. The second half of this race was going to be a mess.

I completed Mile 16 in 10:18, and that was my last mile in under 12 minutes. Not just under 11 minutes, but under 12. Ouch. I walked up almost the entire length of Heartbreak Hill, and this became the slowest mile that I have ever recorded in a marathon, at 15:33. By this point, the second storm had reached us and now it was raining.

The remaining few miles were a combination of walking and running/shuffling. I don't think I have had such a desire to quit a marathon since my first one in Chicago. But I did manage to keep going.

Eventually I made it to the finish line. My final time was 5:03:40, which is almost 20 minutes slower than my previous worst time, which was on a hot sunny day on the big island of Hawaii. It seems as though the brief half hour or so of sun on this day in Boston affected me more than the entire day of sun back then in Hawaii.

I really don't have a good explanation for the poor performance. The sun? Sure, that didn't help. But I've faced worse. Is it because I had just run a marathon less than a month earlier? In retrospect that probably was the biggest factor. I didn't expect it to matter so much, but apparently it did. Or maybe I can just write it off by saying it just wasn't my day. To look at it one way, I am probably fortunate that I've never had to DNF in a marathon before. So I suppose I'm lucky that I've finished all 46 marathons that I have started, even if they weren't all top-notch. Any runner is bound to have a few bad days in 46 attempts. It's certainly bad luck that this "bad day" happened during the Boston Marathon. For such a prestigious event, I would certainly rather have had a performance that I could be proud of. I will almost certainly never get the opportunity to run this race again. If it were any other marathon, I could always go back and attempt to redeem myself in some later year. But that will probably never happen for me at Boston. This PW will forever be my personal Boston Marathon legacy.

Oh well, it is what it is. In these immediate weeks and months afterwards, our family's focus has been on getting Maggie to her normal health. My running has been put aside. With just four states left to finish off the 50, eventually I will have to get back out there. At this point, this will be the closest I will be to starting fresh from ground zero. Even more so than when I broke my ankle a decade ago. At least by the time I run my next marathon I won't still be sore from the previous one...

And now the photos. Click any image to enlarge.