Boston; written by Mark Stickley.
I'm not sure what possessed me to run the Boston Marathon. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But standing at the starting line, with 40,000 runners behind me, wondering if I was going to end up as road kill or a street tattoo, it didn't seem so wonderful.
The Boston Marathon has haunted me ever since my first marathon some 13 years ago. I don't know how many times I've been asked: "Have you ever run Boston?" as if it were the only justification for running at all. Never mind that I've run the Olympic Trials marathon twice, I hadn't run Boston. I just never wanted to. So that was part of the motivation. The other part was the lure of running the 100th running of the world's oldest mara-thon. But the idea fully took root last fall. Running in the Fox Cities Marathon in Wisconsin, as my chances for qualifying for the Olympic Trials were slipping from my grasp, it occurred to me that I could at least qualify for Boston. It was something of a consolation prize, really.
I sent in my entry anyway .
My journey to the start actually began in Hartford, Conn. Bob McCauley, an old friend from college, drove me to Boston on Sunday, the day before the Patriots' Day race. On the way, Paul Simon's "Graceland" was playing in my head.
It made perfect sense. After all, the Boston Marathon is to runners what Graceland is to Elvis fans. The annual gathering in Beantown has been a Mecca for runners for years - but never more than this year. For the 100th running, Boston opened the floodgates. Never before had the field exceeded 10,000. This time it was four times as large. Qualifying standards had previously kept the fields low, but 24,000 qualified and another 16,000 were granted entries to boot. It was a zoo, a mob scene, a street party in the truest sense.
The logistics of the race were every bit as bad as I had expected. Maybe worse. Actually, things went off relatively smoothly, considering. But it meant leaving the hotel at six in the morning for a noon start. My normal pre-race routines were completely out the window.
