Qualifying for Boston
When Maria moved to Boston for college, I casually mentioned that maybe I would run the Boston Marathon and visit her. At that time I wasn’t sure how often she would want us to visit, and this would offer the perfect pretext for visiting. However, things went well, and we visited or she came home on a regular if not super-frequent basis. So no excuse to visit was needed. However, I had made that statement in front of Travis, who always remembered and encouraged me to fulfill my promises/dreams. And so when he went off (going to the same place but definitely not following) to Boston 3 years later, he said, “I’ll see you in April – you know that you promised Maria that you would run the Boston Marathon and this is her last year there.” And there it was, he laid my promise on the table, called it and then had doubled up on it by making it a trip to see both of them.
I hadn’t run a marathon in over 4 years and had no plans to run one when this mid-September bomb dropped. And even if I had run recently, there was the not-so-small matter of qualifying. I never had. I had never really understood the whole attraction of Boston and consequently, I had never really felt a need or desire to run there. This fit neatly with the fact that my best times were still 8-10 minutes short of qualifying. And that is what went through my mind first. Here I am in mid-September, with a strong base of running, but no marathon distance training, no recent race experience and no idea of my speed, with a goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon or, at least in my mind, not lowering my image in the eyes of my son. Peer pressure doesn’t work so well on me, but I do value his respect.
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I also respect the marathon. At 26.2 miles, the distance can take a toll on you even if you are well prepared and at that length, most of us mortals are incapable of running it at a speed fast enough for it to really be a race. I usually control my pace for much of the race, but it controls me at the crucial point where finish times can be greatly increased or hold steady. I knew instantly that I could run a marathon, but I had no idea if I could run a marathon at the necessary speed to qualify. Over the years I had talked to people and read about the need to put it all on the line in order to achieve a significant goal. Basically, this means to risk failure or blowing up. This means running at a pace that is faster than comfortable and that may result not just in not qualifying, but being so tired and depleted that completing the race might not be possible. Imagining failure and the physical fatigue and the mental anguish of dropping out creates a huge mental barrier to truly attempting such a feat. But I resolved to do the training and see if I could get in the speed range that would make a Herculean attempt meaningful.
Training for a marathon always requires a commitment, and training for a marathon that would serve as a qualifier for another marathon seemed an even bigger chore. I quickly decided that it would be best to ignore the effects that the first marathon would have on the second and just see if I could qualify. I started running with a bit more frequency and I started tacking on a few miles to make one run a long run. I started at 12 miles and didn’t seem too tired so that was a good sign. My daily runs felt good and I jumped to 40 miles a week total.
What would I do differently in training for this race? That seems to be a straightforward question
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and the obvious answer was to incorporate speed work into my workouts. But as simple as that sounds, speed work is intimidating and hard and dangerous. Lots of runners get injured from doing speed work while adding long runs while increasing total distance. Many of them never make it to the starting line. Speed work covers relatively short distances but it drains the muscles and can have detrimental effects on runs for other days. It requires a mental toughness to stick with a schedule. For whichever reason, I found it tough to get motivated on those days and worried that an injury was waiting just down the trail. So the obvious idea of speed work would not be my savior.
Another question on my mind was where to run a qualifying marathon. This is a hard decision even when made 6 months in advance. Many of the popular marathons fill up early, and in any case they didn’t allow me adequate time to train. Almost every time I run a marathon, I think that I needed one more month of training in order to be prepared. That feeling is there whether I had a short period (10 weeks) or a long period (20 weeks) to train. Using this logic, I needed at least 10 weeks to train starting in mid-September, so the earliest possible date would be December, and January would be even better. So I started the search for a marathon in the early part of the following year. Well, there aren’t a lot of mid-winter marathons. Plus, I wanted a marathon that would not add an obstacle to qualifying. So I peered over the elevation charts – flat is good and downhill is better. No rolling courses or personal challenges would work. I had only a handful of choices and I eliminated some because of the possibility of heat. I would prefer to try to run fast in the cold than on a warm day. I also ruled out expensive
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cross-country trips and decided on a reasonably local spot: Myrtle Beach in mid-February. Plenty of time to train and hopefully just enough time to register and recover for an April 17th run in Boston. Oh well, one step at a time.
My strength as a runner is consistency. On a regular basis, I run a reasonable distance week after week after week. I don’t do grueling workouts. I am not good at peaking. What I am good at is running my miles at about the same speed one after another – endurance over a standard distance. The trick for me in a marathon is to increase that distance from my normal 7 miles to the largest possible number, knowing that the closer it gets to 26.2 the better.
But then I lost it. I travelled for a few weeks for work and didn’t run. I travelled for vacation and didn’t run. I got sick and didn’t run. We had bad weather and I didn’t run. Christmas came and I didn’t run. Any excuse and I didn’t run. I had weeks without a run. Why? Who knows? My only saving grace was that when I did run, it tended to be a long run. I got back above 40 the first week in January although my long run was only 12 miles and I was now 6 weeks out from the marathon. I followed up on that by travelling and not running for 17 consecutive days. My taper was too long and way too early. I broke that dry spell the morning after my flight home by running 20 miles. It was hard and made harder by the fact that I ran hard. I took 3 recovery days – I needed them - and then ran two 7-milers. Seventeen days out from the marathon, I ran 22 miles. I was determined to get myself in shape for a marathon in a period of 3 weeks – the normal time to start the taper. I reached 44 miles that week, exceeding 40 for only the second time in the past
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eight weeks. After 8 on Sunday, I ran 11 on Monday followed by a long run of 20 miles – on 6 days rest and 11 days before the race. Adding in a 7-miler and another 11-miler, I reached 49 miles. That was my highest recorded weekly mileage in years and one week out from a must-do-well marathon.
Myrtle Beach is a good place for a marathon. It is reasonably flat, has lots of empty hotel rooms in February, is well organized, is reasonably priced and has a temperate climate that seems to cooperate. Crowd support is a bit weak and most fans are there with the specific intent to cheer for a specific person and not for all of the athletes. While some will cheer you on, others will act as if they don’t see you when you are the only runner within a hundred yards. The other notable facts are that there are many more people running the half than the whole, that both races start simultaneously and share the same course for 13 miles, and that they have relay teams as well.
Race day arrives and Myrtle Beach is crawling with runners walking in the dark towards the start line. Like zombies in a frightening flick, we converge to the lights. Prerace is prerace and a few more Port-a-Johns would have been helpful, but the fact that we are using chips, the small total crowd (<5000) and that the starting line is 100 feet away remove any pressure. We will be there when the 6:30 AM start occurs. The sun will not, as it is not scheduled to rise until 6:56 AM. That’s fine, as we will have streetlights and some early morning light before the sun hits the horizon, but it adds to the coolness of the start. It also means that we stand around and start during the daily temperature low and it reduces the chance of heat being a factor, It won’t be a factor today as it is a bit chilly, but really
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the perfect temperature for a marathon. My lucky streak continues.
We don’t so much line up as crowd up. I toss off my sweats and feel cold in my shorts and singlet, but I know that will change after a mile of running. I have run here once before – 7 years ago – and the course start and finish have changed. Because of changes in the Boston qualifying times and my extra years, I only need to cut 2 minutes 13 seconds off of that time. That is only about 4.5 seconds per mile. Of course I have aged and I haven’t had the best training, but... it’s only 4.5 seconds. It is hard to explain to non- runners that 4.5 seconds per mile is actually a lot – particularly for 26.2 miles. But enough complaining. I stood among the runners looking at them and both consciously and subconsciously admiring their fitness and comparing their predicted times to mine. Many are there for the half and I need to run their pace twice. Some are there for fun, some with friends, some to complete the distance and others to race. This is an unusual marathon for me. I am usually there for fun, but today was a challenge. As I told everyone multiple times, I hadn’t run a marathon lately and I was running this one only because of my stated goal: to qualify for Boston. I repeated this to myself and reminded myself that I should not slack off during the race. Either I make Boston or I go down spectacularly in flames. I had never had a DNF (Did Not Finish) at any sporting event, but I kept trying to convince myself that if I didn’t qualify for Boston, I needed a DNF today.
The excitement was palpable as always when the gun sounded and we rocketed off into the thin veil of light now showing. Pacing in the first few miles of a marathon is extremely important: too fast and you
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have ruined your race; too slow and you are likely to establish a rhythm too slow to achieve your optimal time. Most of the time in a daily run, I look to my body to communicate the pace. However, I have discovered over time that this is an unreliable indicator at races, since the adrenaline faucet is running at full blast. Everything feels too easy. For this reason, I try to pull back my pace to feel slow at first and judge my pace through the first mile by whether I am passing or being passed. Usually more people should be passing me as they sprint out and this was particularly true with today’s group. Without a careful examination of the bibs, there was no obvious way to know what race category others were. The relay runners, and there were about 200 at the front, were all running a 10K pace. The halfs were running, well in the first mile, many of them were running a 10K pace. Mile 1 and 2 clicked off fast but controlled. Shortly after that I spotted 4 Port-a- Johns which were, to the best of my recollection, the only ones on the course. I decided to make a preemptive stop. Not needed, but done, and I am back in the flow.
The miles kept flowing by and at a good pace. I was steady and there was little variation from one to the next. We visited the tourist sites on the edge of town and one pancake house after another. Let’s finish this run and eat some pancakes! As we neared the half, I felt good and for some reason felt that I should speed up so that I could pass some of those half-marathoners before they turned off. I don’t think that I impressed any of them but it did speed the split. One after another, runners turned off the course towards their finish as we ploughed ahead to our own half marker. I crossed at 1:42:14. It is hard to know until later whether
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a half time is good or bad. If it turns out that you have a low time but sacrificed finish speed, that is bad. If you have a slow time but saved energy for the second half, well then you were a genius. I judged this time to not be too fast given my goal and perhaps even a little too slow. Knowing that the last part of the run eats up time, I calculated how much time I had in the bank – how much slower I could run in the second half. So I had 2 minutes and 46 seconds to carry over, plus I could run the second half slower by 2 minutes and 46 seconds and still make it.
Doing math in marathons is always risky and usually requires that the same operations be done multiple times before the results are accurate and remembered. I don’t wear a GPS or even a watch and I subtract my past time from my current time to obtain my split, and divide my total time by distance to know my average pace. So my calculation at half was that I had run about a 7:48 pace. To run an even qualifying time, I needed a pace of exactly 8-minute miles. So this meant that in the second half I could slow down from 7:48 to 8:00, plus I had an extra 12 seconds per mile available so I could run an 8:12 pace from here on out – that is 24 seconds slower per mile! This seems complicated sitting at a desk, but it is truly complicated when running. On the positive side, by the time I knew all of this I had crossed the 14-mile marker running at the same pace, and so I had even more time in the bank and less distance to cover.
While 24 seconds per mile seems a lot slower, many runners commonly experience decreases in speed of 2 or 3 minutes per mile in the later stages. Given this, even though it might be the correct action, we don’t immediately take advantage of this time but
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we try to maintain the pace for as long and as far as we can. And that is exactly what did.
As I mentioned, the crowd support in Myrtle Beach tends to be personal rather than generic. However, if you bring along a dedicated supporter, fan, family member or even just a hyperactive person that you meet the night before, their opportunities to interact with you are ample. In the second half, the runners are spread out. Side streets are empty. Parking is available. Eva had come along for the adventure and she saw me 9 or 10 times and stopped off for a latte. On one occasion, she cheered for me for 50-75 yards as I approached, then 2 minutes later I hear her cheering for me for 50-75 yards as I approached, and then a third time just down the road. She was doing all of the work, but I had to smile and be friendly each time. Fortunately I felt good, and I shared this with her. Normally this is the time when I shrug my shoulders and say that I am not sure how this is going to conclude.
We cut through a small area filled with people and find an active zone with an aid station. I sip on the cool Gatorade and start running again. Zip. Zip. I have been passed by 2 guys running at full speed that look as fresh as if they had just started. Wait, they are relay guys running the anchor legs. Wow. There’s Eva. I smile again and totally out of character, I claim victory saying, “I’ll make it.” Hah, what kind of idiot makes a finish time prediction with 6 miles – the last six miles - to go? Well me, I guess. I felt good. I felt strong. The weather was perfect at about 50 degrees and sunny. I had maintained my pace and had about 4 minutes “in the bank” with 6 miles to go. That meant that I could
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average an 8:40 and break 3 hours 30 minutes. Not a problem today.
Off I went to claim victory. Miles 21-24.5 were a straight shot up Kings Highway, paralleling the beach. This is a major road and we ran on the right side. It was flat but I felt like it had the slightest roll. The change was small but it dipped down to sea level and then, dare I use the word, “climbed” up to 40 feet above sea level. It felt a bit harder but not significant, but the time on the clock had ticked more than I expected and I needed to maintain the pace. Where had the time gone? Suddenly at mile 24, my calculations showed that I could not slow down any more and that I needed 8:45 miles for 2.2 miles to meet my goal. Two miles ago and this wouldn’t have seemed like much of a challenge. So this is what it had come down to at the end: I had to run a not-fast pace, but faster than the last 2 miles. All of that big talk about running on the edge and risking a flameout was just talk if there was no energy, but I felt reasonably good. There was nothing to do but stick my head down and try to run the next 2 miles.
I am not sure if you have ever run fast at the end of a marathon, but a little bit of speed will take you past a lot of people who are slowing down step by step. It will also play tricks on your mind. You can be strong for a minute and feel exhausted the next minute and then surge again. I ran a fairly steady pace with a few surges thrown in. At mile 25 I figured I had about 11 minutes plus a minimal difference between the gun and chip times. Again, barring a breakdown, I am there. So I pushed even harder and headed home. I missed the clock at mile 26 (or it wasn’t there) but felt safe as I turned towards the finish. Oh yeah, either I had really run the past mile, there had been a clock error, or
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my calculations were too conservative, but I had plenty of time and ran leisurely over the finish line with 1 minute 20 seconds to spare.
I had qualified for Boston. I had 9 weeks to get ready. But first there were pancakes to eat.
P.S. I learned afterwards that Boston rounds your time down to the minute and so there is an extra 59 seconds available. I had time to stop for pancakes on the course!
For more on qualifying times, see
http://www.runhardrunfun.com/2009/06/boston- marathon-qualifying-times.html
