There is a question that runs through my head once the pain of any endurance race starts to really set in. It usually happens multiple time during an Ironman, almost immediately in a short-course triathlon, and usually around mile 17-18 in an open marathon. The question is “why am I doing this?”

Honestly, I really don't know the answer….. There is almost nothing about the experience that is enjoyable in the normal sense of the word. The logistics of getting to the race are stressful and then the race itself is a slow evolution from tedious to wildly painful. Its true that there is a moment when you cross the finish line (especially if you’ve done well) when the pain subsides and a feeling of relief washes over you. But that moment is fleeting and is soon replaced by nausea and muscle aches. And yet I (and many, many others) keep coming back over and over.

Maybe we just want to be the kind of people that our future selves can be proud of.

Anyway, about the actual race…

Training leading into Boston was really quite good. I managed to stay healthy the entire time, while building up to about 65 miles per week at my peak. I had the idea in my head of running 2:40 or under but based on the last few key workouts in the weeks before the race, I realized that was not in the cards. Still, I thought I was in shape to run under 2:45 (even closer to 2:42-3 under the right conditions).

The week leading up to the race weather was a real concern. Last year, they had historically bad weather with torrential rain, high winds and cold and this year’s forecast was looking eerily similar to that. About a week out, the forecast was for a stiff headwind, temps in the mid 40s and heavy, persistent rain. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately, see below….) things steadily improved and on the night before the race, the forecast was for some rain, a cross/tail wind and temps on the mid-to-high 50s.

Race morning logistics for the Boston Marathon are a pain in the ass. It is a point-to-point race where the start is well outside the city and essentially inaccessible except by race-provided shuttle busses from downtown Boston. So for a 10am race start I had to leave where I was staying at 6am to take the T to downtown Boston, get on a big yellow school bus for a little over an hour and then hang around the start area for an hour and a half. The annoyance was a little tempered though by the fact that a huge thunderstorm rolled through Boston while waiting in line for the shuttle bus in Boston Common. Standing in torrential rains and high wind, freezing my ass off made me more than happy to get on the bus and sit for a while. And by the time we reached the start area in Hopkinton, the rain had cleared up (it turns out for good).

By the time I was corralled it was close to 60, the sun was peeking out from the clouds and, after all the rain over night into the early morning, it was feeling pretty humid. These aren’t bad conditions per se, but I probably should have been more concerned about the heat. We haven’t really had any warm weather in Virginia yet so I had only done a handful or runs in warm temperatures and I don’t think any runs in humid conditions. In the moment though I didn’t think of it at all since it actually felt quite comfortable and I was relieved that it wasn’t freezing cold and raining.

At 10:02am we started. I was in corral 2, which means there were about 1500 runners in front of me. The thing I wasn’t quite prepared for, having never done a big marathon like Boston before, is just how crowded it would be through the first 10k. It was was really, really crowded. I felt like I was running shoulder to shoulder with 3-4 people at all time for at least the first 30 minutes. That would not really have been a problem if I had made more of an effort to get in the front of corral 2 in the morning (since I would have been running at my goal pace in the crowd) but I was a bit nonchalant in the situation and ended up somewhere in the middle of corral 2. So I was stuck in a crowd that was running about 10s/km slower than my goal pace through the first 5km. Altogether not the worst thing in the world as it forced me to be conservative in the beginning and I wasn’t stupid enough to waste a bunch of energy joking for a better position in the early part of the race, but still….

So I went through the first 5km split a little on the slow side (4:00/pace whereas my goal pace was 3:50/km) but after 5km things opened up and I was able to settle into my goal pace comfortably.

The next 20km were pretty boring. The first roughly 15 miles of the Boston Marathon are either downhill or flat so my goal pace felt easy and the atmosphere on the course really was something special. You run through all of this little New England towns where the locals really come out in force to cheer the runners on. My biggest regret from this section is that I didn’t hydrate more vigilantly. Nevertheless, I went through the half in 1:22:xx which seemed ideal for me given the slow start. I figured that I could cruise to at worst an even split which would have me in under 2:45.

Then came the Newton Hills….

From around 25km to 33km, the course goes from mostly downhill/flat to relentlessly rolling right at the time where the wear and tear of the race is really starting to set it. No one hill is particularly bad but all taken together they really do exert quite a toll on you. The good news though is that once you crest Heartbreak Hill (the last hill in the sequence), you have about 5 miles of almost all downhill to the finish.

Downhill may sound good in the abstract, but it turns out that when your leg muscles are already shot, running downhill sucks quite a lot…. Of course I already knew this from long experience but I manage to maintain a state of perfect denial.

I won’t belabor the point here, but suffice it to say that I made it to the crest of Heartbreak Hill with very little left in my legs and the next 4 miles were extremely painful. I had to walk anytime the grade (down or up) increased since both my quads and hamstrings felt like they were going to lock up. My average pace went from around 3:50-55/km to about 4:20/km over this section. When I ran past the “1 mile to go” sign, I was at 2:43:0x race time so I made a concerted effort to keep running the last mile to finish under 2:50. Fortunately the last mile is basically flat so I could keep a decent run going without too much trouble. I crossed the line at 2:49:3x.