Running for Your Life: Training for Boston

So back at it. Blogging and marathon training. Not the New York City Marathon, which is only days away. (Don’t miss the excitement if you’re in the city. Last year I came home from an old boys’ reunion weekend to find a rockabilly street band still! playing at the ten-mile mark at Fourth Avenue and Center Slope three hours after the start for the walkers and the stragglers and the sheer gut-priders who were ambling past.) No, I’m up for Boston, my second attempt after coming up lame in 2011.

What better way to set the tone than training along the Seine in Paris. Mary took these shots during our one-week vacation to Paris this month. I ran twice. Once on Sunday (Oct. 16), when during daylight hours the roadway along the right bank was cleared of motorbikes, cars and trucks and again on Thursday (Oct. 20), when these pictures were taken from the Marais/Isle de St. Louis bridge. On this run in the dying light of a brilliant day I was gone for only forty-five minutes, and felt as if I could’ve been out for hours. Certainly the memories of that day will help to fill my long hours of training ahead of me.

I will not be pushing it. But I want to add a simple twenty-five minutes to my long run. So that I bump up to 1:30 from 1:05, starting tomorrow (Oct. 26). In this way, I will learn if it is true that my hamstring is fully healed, that I’ve kept to management forefoot pain. Outside of the slight and occasional shin splint pain I’ve been fit as a fiddle.

Marathon running, of course, isn’t for everyone. Despite what I’ve written here, long-distance running is the hidden sport. Few people outside the sport itself know the names of its legends. Those superhuman men and women, the top five hundred finishers, who in the next few days will be arriving to run the New York City Marathon.

On Sunday (Oct. 23) we were back from Paris only a few hours when we met an old friend in the park while we were running Thurber. Jose is in high spirits and running gear, too little clothes for the cold, and I ask how was his run. “Good, good! Fourteen today and last week, sixteen.” Why yes, he tells me he will be running New York. Then on to other matters: work, mutual friends, the weather.

Running will draw thousands to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Sunday, Nov. 4. That’s eleven days from today (Oct. 25), and just as many personal and sportive narratives. All races are run on the inside track. The triumphs, after all those hours of running and cross-training, strengthening and stretching, the exquisite solitude of it, yours alone.

But you to want to do it right. I set out on this blog, 106 posts ago, with the idea of a Boston Marathon uppermost in the mind. I’ve learned in these past months many things about myself while at the same time hearing from a good number of old friends and new friends, whether I’ve written about running or simply just written. Hopefully, there has been a lesson or two to be learned. I don’t know what I’ll do with the blog after the race in April. Or whether this Boston Marathon will be my last. Training is a helluva time commitment. And we have only so much time, don’t we?

Next: Running for Your Life: J’ai Perdu Mon Clef!