Hills. Humidity. Lots of soreness from last night's track session. But I got 8.26 done this morning up and down Massard and the amphitheater path (the easy way). Then I took a three hour nap. We'll see if I'm up to MP run tomorrow.
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I've tended to give this blog short shrift for a while. Too much stuff to do, too little time. But I think today is an appropriate day to change that, at least for one day.
When I resumed running in July 2007, at age 46 after 21 years of indolence, I didn't think I had a snowball's chance of ever qualifying for Boston. Even the thought of training 40 miles in a week was overwhelming. But Sasha planted a seed in the spring of 2008, that maybe there was more left in these old legs than I thought. And that seed quickly sprouted into an obsession. I trained like a madman and a year and a half later, I had that precious BQ. A year and a half after that, I ran Boston, had one of the most wonderful weekends of my life, and vowed to return.
Then they made it six minutes tougher to qualify. I haven't been able to find those six minutes yet, or even improve on the PR that got me the BQ. I thought I might have to wait for the next age group bump to return.
Then those pressure cookers exploded on Boylston Street last April. The runner in the orange singlet who was knocked down by the blast? He was just about exactly on the path I took to the finish in 2011. After that, I had to be there in 2014. I had to show those bastards, and every other coward who might consider something similar, that runners are not going to be cowered by terrorists. We deal with searing heat, draining humidity, icy winds, foot-numbing cold, torrential rain and the vagaries of our own bodies. A hardware-store bomb is not going to deter us either.
How was I going to do that? Well, I'd run five marathons this year, four since the bombing, with varying degrees of speed but no BQ. So I was left with charity spots. I knew of a charity that friends had run for, more of a national-type charity than the more local ones for the Boston area. And I got hooked up with them. Tuesday night, I got the email that registration for those spots would open on Wednesday. And by dawn on Wednesday, I had registered. And made my hotel reservations shortly thereafter. I will indeed be in Hopkinton on April 21, 2014. I'll run through Ashland and Framingham and Natick and Wellesley and Newton and Brookline and into Boston. I'll high-five kids, and kiss a coed or two, and hear the boisterous cheers on Heartbreak Hill and on the BC campus. I'll run through Kenmore Square and past Fenway Park, where Red Sox fans celebrated last night. And I'll cross that line on Boylston Street. And I'm sure I'll look over at the spots where the bombs detonated as I come down that final half-mile.
I have no doubt that the experience I have next April will be different than I had three Aprils previous. How could it not be? For all the prestige of qualifying for and running Boston, it had been just a race. Not any more. Now it's a statement, by a city, and by 36,000 runners who are making sure they'll be there. New York is rebuilding at the site of the World Trade Center. There are no destroyed buildings on Boylston, but we are rebuilding too -- with our passion, our sweat, our endless miles and the molecules of shoe sole rubber we lay down on roads and sidewalks and trails all over the world. We are runners and we cannot be defeated by terror. We are all, indeed, Boston Strong. That's why I must be there, and why I will be there.
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