Running for Your Life: More Boston

It’s been a week now since the Boston Marathon. What was it like?

I can’t imagine another four thousand runners on that course. As it was about four thousand stayed home because of the heat (and that the race administrator assured them that their qualifying times could be carried over until Boston 2013). Ninety degrees at its worst at the midpoint and beyond, to the throngs that ring the final four miles, screaming so much and so loud that they must have been hoarse with all the “Go! Go! Go!, You’re Looking Great! You’re a Hero!” My left foot – yes, again – was killing me, had been for a long time, but in that final four miles, Mile 22 and on, a little bit more than four, of course, 385 yards, that’s the length of almost four US football fields, so after twenty-six it is more than a kick, and then it’s Boylston Street, and yeah, let the tears flow because you made it, OC, not only made it but you’ve got enough left to run it, pass more runners than pass you. What is time? Past, present and future all in, which speaks to the signs on the route, Wellesley’s All In, Newton’s All In, Brookline’s All In.

The third-hottest Boston Marathon on record, for the first seven miles, precious little room on the packed course to even manage heel strikes, hard to find a rhythm, do what you’d trained yourself to do to ease the foot pain, feel the full foot, the toes, buy the barefoot running bargain, but no matter what you try to do the pain comes early, feeling it at 10K, and murder beyond.

Hell, yes, I stopped to walk; once, at about Mile 17, next to a man with a Canadian flag on his tunic, gray-haired guy like me and we talk about the Toronto Marathon coming up in October, gotta be better weather than this, and I say to him in sort of a pledge that I hope I can cross the finish line on a run at least. It’s so hot flimsy plastic cups lie in the gutter in melted clumps.

“Survive first,” he said. Good advice. As were the words from the woman at Mile 3 in Ashland, Mass.: “Save some for later,” and the best yet, the runner I've come to refer to as the race camp director at Mile 12, 13 and 14, before he was swallowed up in the crowd, loudly telling all of us around him to “Reset your posture! ... Arms in the air! . . . Just run a mile at a time!”

Everyone (all 22,480 of us) with a single goal to finish (21,606 did!) and the crowds willing us on. The “Kiss Me” sign gang at Wellesley, the myriad garden hosers, in each and every town on Route 135, the fire department had set out freezing water Swedish massage spray tents.

After my talk with my Canadian friend at Mile 17, I didn’t stop and walk again, only to Gatorade and water up and to take ice shards from blue bags held out by roadside angels and put the ice bits in my hat, helping to keep the body temp down – not something I fully understood then, but later that some runners finished with temps of 101 and higher, the threat of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, organ failure, something that very well could have happened – but the water stations, the fist-pumps, the waves of cheers, thousands upon thousands of well-wishers out there in the sweltering heat were magic as antidote.

And it all comes down to Bolyston Street, where in the final near four football field stretch that I put it out there, all that I had to give so that when I crossed the finish line I did so at a pace that was like the beginning in a way that I’ve come to think of time on this day being like one big every retreating second. One (that the image at right would seem to suggest) I will never forget.

Running for Your Life: After Boston