From Forrest [and Bob] Hamilton…
Qualifying for the Boston Marathon carries a certain amount of cachet and I’d wanted a piece of that since I started running. The fact we have family there and I spent childhood holidays in and around Boston only made the pull stronger. I’d happily qualified at the second attempt and, not content with inviting himself to come along and watch, my Dad had qualified (much more easily) himself.
[My lad somehow thinks it’s easy to go sub 4 hours at my age. To be fair, though, there is some extra dispensation for age in qualifying – perhaps a reward for still being able to run at all at this ancient stage of life.]
Logistically, the whole experience is far easier if you have a family willing to feed you and drive you to the start to avoid sitting on a cramped bus for an hour. For someone who struggles with crowds (the worst was to come) and has only done marathons where you could walk to the start from home, this was a relief.
To their credit, the BAA and the 9,000 volunteers (!!!) who put on the race have clearly learned a thing or two in the 130 years it’s been running, because the whole thing ran pretty seamlessly.
[Ditto that. Having abandoned the idea of ever again doing a big city marathon after running the very first London – when a field of 8,000 felt like madness – Boston was incredibly slick. The only glitch – for us – was being separated at the security check before the final shuttle, getting on different buses, and then never seeing each other again. We both soon gave up any hope of finding the other. I actually suspect my lad was seeking some peace and quiet for his final mental preparation, not wanting me wittering away in his ear.]
I was a little concerned about being boxed in at the start as you’re seeded based on qualifying time (2.49) and there was a rather large disparity between that time and the 2.36 I was hoping to run in order to get a London Championship entry. Despite plenty of reports online suggesting the crowds would thin out within a mile or two, helping you not go out too fast, I did not find this to be the case. The first 6 miles of the race were spent overtaking thousands of runners, mainly running in the gutter and narrowly avoiding collisions. I managed to run target pace in these first downhill miles, but the energy cost was far greater than it should have been.
[Like Forrest, I was surprised at how conservatively people were running in my wave through the first few miles, although in my case it was hundreds rather than thousands that I was overtaking. For me, it wasn’t so problematic and I quite enjoyed the distraction of weaving between runners trying to find space to run at what felt like a relaxed pace. Slower than that never feels comfortable.]
Training for a marathon with an ambitious time goal is a tricky thing. You walk a fine line between injury, illness and overtraining. With the benefit of hindsight, I may have overcooked it slightly, striving for that extra percent or two of fitness. My hamstrings and glutes had that giveaway heavy feeling from the beginning and felt downright angry by mile 8. By this point, I had more or less given away the chance to hit 2.36 and instead focused on running a solid race I could be proud of, running strong to the end.
[It’s a fine line indeed and I’d erred the other way, sacrificing some conditioning to make sure I arrived on the start line without any niggles. My taper had worked and I felt great through the first ten miles, possibly too great because I was thinking I might be good for 3.40 something, way beyond any expectations I had at the beginning of last year, when sub 4 seemed ambitious.]
You hit the famous Wellesley scream tunnel just before the halfway point and it provided an ironically unhelpful boost to morale. I glanced down at my watch as I had unconsciously surged to 5.30 minute mile pace, not ideal.
[As someone who easily loses concentration, having hundreds of young women from Wellesley College (annual fees just shy of $100,000) suddenly screaming at me was a welcome boost to engage with the race again and check in on my form. I’d been warned but expected them to have lost their voices by the time I came through. I still can’t believe they waited for me. The noise was extraordinary. And my form was still okay too – half-marathon in 1.47.25.]
It’s a pretty rough feeling crossing the halfway point, with your pace already fading and legs starting to burn, knowing you have to do that all over again. Instead I thought only of reaching the next water station (every mile) to dump water over myself to stay refreshed. You reach a big downhill just before the infamous Newton Hills and I made a concerted effort not to surge (although still dropped my fastest mile since the opening downhills). Boston is a real rollercoaster of a course and it’s mostly very enjoyable (if you like downhill running) as it keeps you engaged.
The first two – of three – hills were pretty gradual and were survived in decent shape, helped by knowing my wife was waiting for me in between them. Seeing her gave me another boost, which, again, might have been unhelpful as I cheerfully powered on towards Heartbreak Hill feeling quite full of myself. I’ve never done a race with such a swing in emotions, swapping between feeling horrendous and delirious about twenty times.
I ran Heartbreak the day before on my shakeout and it made me nervous. By Yorkshire standards it’s barely a lump, but I knew how much I’d be hurting. And so it proved. My hip flexors, working overtime to compensate for my hamstring tightness, started screaming at me and I started to find people overtaking me for the first time in the race.
[I’m clearly more naive. Forrest and I took a gentle run together the morning before the race to recce the Newton Hills and it was hard to fathom what the fuss was about. They’d barely qualify for a hill back home. I felt my power dropping in the lead up to them in the race, but they didn’t present a problem except for slowing my pace. But things started to go wrong once past the crest. It wasn’t the hill that broke my heart but its aftermath. I soon began to understand.]
The received wisdom at Boston is that you need to reach the top of Heartbreak Hill ready to take advantage of the nearly all downhill final 10k to the finish. I wasn’t. The marathon is almost impossible to get right, in training and on the day, and I made a few mistakes which meant the final miles were more about survival than anything else. Seeing Boston city centre, it felt like a long way away and I discovered how far five miles is when you’re hurting. I saw the Citgo sign and it still felt far to the finish. Only when I turned right onto Hereford did I allow myself the cathartic release that I’d done it. Turning left onto Boylston, I tried to put in a final surge to dip under 2.39 but my hamstrings defiantly rejected that assertion of will.
[As with my lad, the last five miles felt like a very long way. My calves were cramping badly, going into spasm mid-stride, almost having me on the deck a couple of times. I slowed down and tried to get back to my previous rhythm but each time I picked up the pace the calves started to twitch. I reset my ambitions and thought I’d still be on to beat the time I did in my very first marathon, all the way back in 1977. The support in the last few miles is amazing, and the noise almost too much, but I wasn’t able to enjoy it all as much as I’d have liked. I was running in my own bubble, simply keeping going as fast as I dare.]
Despite my suffering, I made sure to enjoy the crowds of the final miles and the iconic scenery.
It’s amazing how quickly your brain shuts your body down after you’ve crossed the line. Within ten minutes I was shivering uncontrollably ‘like a fish out of water’ on the grounds of Boston Garden. My wife dressed me as I was unable to even remove my vest. At least I could say with some certainty, I couldn’t have run any faster.
[Forrest had a long wait for me, not least because I started a whole hour behind him. I lost a lot of time in the last few miles and failed to beat my revised goal, albeit by only a handful of seconds. I’ll take that as an incentive to do better next year, when it will be 50 years on from that first run, in the ‘Masters & Maidens’, the only marathon then where women were allowed to compete, and also where the time-keepers stayed around long enough to record the efforts of old men – or a young man who’d become addicted to running without a clue as to what he was doing. That race was completed in a pair of cheap Woolworth plimsolls.]
The loveliest part of the day was sitting in Boston Garden after the race, waiting for Dad and getting to enjoy some tense dot watching amongst trying to reply to an overwhelming amount of kind messages. We were surrounded by people celebrating the achievement of a lifetime, plenty of tears, bear hugs and screaming.
[Once over the line, slightly disappointed to have collapsed in form so badly but nonetheless proud of a time I’d have taken before the day, the first thing I did was reach for my phone to check on Forrest. I was thrilled to see that he’d got under 2.40. I never believed I had that kind of time in me at his age. He might have missed his ambitious target but I knew he’d be happy enough with that. It’s far easier for things to go wrong than for everything to go right – as I discovered. The legs were in a delicate condition on the short walk to the park to meet up with our party and then to get to where the car had been left. Thankfully the sun was out and it felt warm, so I didn’t feel cold, although my daughter-in-law was in hysterics when we had to climb a flight of steps and the calves went into spasm again. Why do people find cramps so funny? That said, I was laughing myself at that point. I was keen to know which was the better performance on age-adjusted terms and to Forrest’s surprise (but not mine), it turned out to be his (81% to 78% according to Gemini). I think we’re likely to renew this contest next year. I’m also thinking now that I have quite a lot of room for improvement, possibly more than my son. That’s laying the gauntlet down, young man.]
Results
(1 John Korir 2.01.52)
231 Ruaridh Mon-Williams 2.27.52
1100 Forrest Hamilton 2.39.10
20110 Bob Hamilton 3.52.00
29023 finished