I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday! It went great! Apparently my body likes sea level and going downhill! The race went fast on multiple levels.

The short version

It was a blur of cheering and noise and being continually astonished at how fast I was going, the miles ticking away unbelievably quickly from the sheer energy of the crowds and the other runners, a brief annoying stop at a port-a-john, and a finish time that was almost 4 full minutes faster than I thought I could conceivably do going into this.

As usual, you can find the activity on Strava if you like!

By the numbers:

• Official time: 2:51:04 (6:32/mile)
• 2,431 / 5,775 among men 18 – 39
• 3,046 / 16,449 among men
• 3,207 / 29,297 overall

I’m usually a top 1 – 2% finisher… in much smaller local marathons. (For scale: Denver Colfax and Boulderthon had less than 10% as many marathoners last year as this year’s field at Boston. So the numbers check out.) Part of the great fun of this — and part of what makes it crazy — is being in a race where there are thousands of people who are as fast or faster than me, not a dozen or two.

When I go into a race, I always have a range of expectations for how it might go, from on a perfect day… through my best guess to something will have gone wrong if I can’t hit this. Every so often, I surprise myself and blow past the top of that spectrum. Yesterday was such a day. My “if it’s a perfect day” number was somewhere in the vicinity of 2:55:00. Coming in 4 minutes faster than that with a force toilet stop along the way means I had deeply underestimated how my fitness would combine with sea level, but in a good way.

Back in October, I had such a terrible disc herniation in my lower back that I couldn’t get off the floor the next morning and had to go to the ER. I could barely walk for weeks, couldn’t really run for a couple months. I wasn’t sure if I would even make it here. Multiple times along the way I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. And yet, by the grace of God, a lot of support from my wife and daughters, a lot of good planning on the part of my coach, and a lot of a hard work, I got here, and it went so well. I’m profoundly grateful, and I’m really proud of how hard I worked along the way: not just at running, but at PT and Pilates and cross-training, too.

And now, onward. My next race is running a leg of the Denver Colfax Marathon Relay with some friends in just about four weeks. After that… we’ll see! Yesterday’s time should have solidly qualified me for the 2027 Boston, Chicago, and NYC Marathons, so hopefully I’ll be running at least one of those next year.

A deep dive

This is long. It’s primarily for me, to remember! But you’re welcome to read along.

Build

The build back to this started in earnest in December — after spending October and November trying to work through enough PT and pain treatment that I could sleep through the night, stand, and walk (much less run) without agonizing nerve pain. But start again I did, however painfully and slowly. I had to ease back in with walk-runs. I spent a lot of time running slower than I’ve run since coming back after a bout of Covid in early 2022.

I decided, given how dicey this was, to hire a coach to help me build back in coordination with PT. It was a very good call! It turned out this build required a lot of adaptation and flexibility, and having a coach rather than a pre-baked plan helped a ton eith that.

I was feeling pretty decent as I came out of December — not good, but on track. Then I came down with this year’s variant of norovirus, and I felt awful for a week. It took me another two weeks after that before I could run for more than thirty minutes without having to stop and go to the bathroom mid-run. I kept at it even so, and by February training was back to normal. Slow, but normal. Normal felt good! From that point I was able to do a fairly steady, normal build.

Until three weeks out from the race, when I got sick with some nasty head cold that took ten days to go away, and which I couldn’t run through. Once I finally cleared it, I got in one last long workout run 11 days before the race and then tapered for the race. It was weird to be doing a “taper” after having been almost entirely off for ten days, but it worked well enough. The race results are suggestive: that close, I might have been able to gain a little more by not being off for those days, but I definitely didn’t lose anything I had built by that point. That last big workout was after the point I would normally have started tapering, but it was low risk because I hadn’t hit a functional overreaching point as one often does in a build and instead was fresh. I judged — correctly, as it proved — that the fitness from it would show up right around race day.

The last hiccup was a minor hip adductor strain on my last interval session, exactly a week before the race. I went out for what was supposed to be a fun fartlek-style workout, and on the very first interval, my left adductor pulled a bit. I worked through it the rest of that run, and then kept it loose and mobile but didn’t overdo it the rest of the week, and hoped it would clear up. Happily, it did: by Friday it was most of the way gone, and the last few niggles disappeared over the weekend.

It was, suffice it to say, a very strange build. I never felt like I had meaningful momentum for longer than a few weeks at a stretch. I came into the race much less sure of what my pace would be as a result — mostly, as I kept telling people who asked, just happy to have made it there at all.

Race weekend

I flew into Boston midday Saturday and used the expo and packet pickup time as a super easy run to loosen up after the plane flight. I then discovered that my hotel room didn’t have a minifridge or a toaster or anything. It just meant I wasn’t going to be eating cereal and toast (much less a fried egg!) like usual on race morning.¹ I did my usual shakeout run Sunday morning, then picked up some coffee, a cup of overnight oats, and a little egg sandwich on an English muffin. After that I walked over to Church of the Cross, an Anglican congregation that meets a mile or so from downtown Boston. Along the way: a bagel… with about a third of the cream cheese they had put on it. After church: three hours chatting with a friend over another bagel, this one with avocado and turkey.

On the way back, I improvised and picked up some muffins from Trader Joe’s for race morning. Then I walked to a restaurant that looked good, only to realize that they had nothing that wasn’t going to sit much too heavily for race day. I made my way back to the place I’d had dinner on Saturday evening, and ended up ordering a burger and some fries. It was a good burger, but it also ended up being a good reminder that a good burger really isn’t what you want the night before a race. I also pondered a bit the fact that between the shakeout and walking around the city so much, I had put 10 miles and about 20,000 steps on my legs. Whoops.

Then I headed back to my hotel, made sure everything was prepped for the morning, took a melatonin, and drifted quickly off to sleep.

I woke up at about 5:45, had my breakfast — somewhat bemused at what I had scrounged, but it got the job done just fine. After that, I walked down to get in line for the buses to the start area.

The ride took about 45 minutes. I enjoyed chatting with my seat-mate — a doctor from Washington State who has run Boston a few times — about everything from running (of course) to our careers. Along the way, I made sure to finish fueling up — a KIND bar and the rest of my Skratch Labs Hydration mix.

Then it was out of the buses and onto the Hopkinton Middle and High School fields for the wait for the start of the race.

We waited there for the better part of an hour — all to the good, with enough time to hydrate a bit more, hit the port-a-johns again, and then walk/jog down the three quarters of a mile to the start line. Unlike your average regional race, there really wasn’t much room to warm up for this. I did what I could, as did lots of the folks around me, but it wasn’t like we had room to jog for a mile and do some strides. More like: do a bunch of high knees, A- and B-skips, and butt-kicks while making my way down to the starting area, and then finding enough room to run up and down the last little hill before we all filed into the corrals.

The race

If you’ve run a major marathon, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s a completely different experience from even decently-large regional marathons. If you haven’t, it’s hard to put into words just how different it is. There were few steps that weren’t to the sound of cheering, sometimes deafening — Wellesley and the finish line were both almost painfully loud. Equally novel: to run a race where I ran not a single step where I wasn’t in the midst of thousands of other people moving just as fast as I was. These past few years, I have been fast enough that in smaller races like Colfax, the field spreads out and I spend a lot of it in a fairly solitary way. (The Longview Half in 2024 was really solitary, running entirely alone out in front after the first mile or so!) The spectators provide a lot of energy, and the fellow runners at least as much. It’s quite the 1 – 2 punch of energy!

One interesting consequence of that was that the miles ticked away unbelievably quickly. Boston has hydration at every mile, and I kept being amazed that another mile was already gone. Some small part of that was how fast I was moving — but I’ve run that fast and faster before. I was running Denver Colfax that fast last year, but it didn’t feel anywhere near as fast there as it did in Boston. Boston was just a blur — an exciting, memorable blur, but a blur.

I felt great from the start, but I was flying. Even accounting for sea level and the big downhill the course starts with, I was moving 20 – 30 seconds faster per mile than I had planned. But I was paying close attention to my perceived exertion and carefully watching my heart rate as well to act as a “limiter”, because I knew that the energy of the crowd around me would make it easy to be pulled along at the pace of the folks around me. And so it was! I kept reminding myself to run my own race — slowing down and not chasing the folks I started with, but also not worrying when I ended up surging through a pack at other times. I had a few concerning moments in the first few miles with my legs feeling a little sluggish and tired — I suspect from the too-many-miles of walking I had done on Sunday. I ignored them, though, figuring it would go away if I just kept going, and soon enough it did.

Things were going swimmingly up through the next few miles. My fueling was on track, and I kept it that way all race. (In fact, I hit every gel right on time except for one, which I got to a kilometer late because the kilometers were ticking off so fast mentally! But then right back on track.) My legs were loose and happy, and I was running faster than I had believed possible. Then, right around mile marker 10, my gut started telling me about the previous evening’s hamburger. Dang it!

I managed to slow down just a bit, work through it, and pick back up the pace after a couple minutes. Then it hit again, a little worse, at around the half marathon mark. Both times, I thought I might be clear of it after working through it, but as I came through mile marker 19, it came back with a vengeance. I’ve done this enough that I knew I had to stop or risk having a very bad time later in the race — so I veered off to the next port-a-john station, happy to see that there were four of them and betting I’d be able to hop straight into one. Alas: no, I got there right as the door closed on the last one and I waited… and waited… and waited. It felt like an eternity, because the race was running behind me. Once one of the toilets finally opened, I got in and out as fast as I could and got back on the course. All told I lost about 2½ minutes. (Yes, that means I’d have PR’d if it weren’t for that. Drat!) It was frustrating, but it was also definitely the right call: I had no issues the rest of the race.

Notably, this came right in the midst of the infamous hills in Newton — the ones that culminate in “Heartbreak Hill” — but happily, I was able to just roll through them other than that bathroom stop. I have years of experience running big hills in Colorado, and I went into them explicitly aiming not to “press” through them. It’s really easy to try to hold one’s pace instead of holding one’s power output or effort level when hitting a hill, but it’s deeply counterproductive in most situations. The exception: I gather it’s a useful tactical move in a competitive racing situation to be able to throw down as a challenge. I haven’t found myself in that spot, though: I am always just racing myself.

The last 10K felt intense, but in a very good way. I was hurting, I knew I could hold on, and I did. My perceived exertion was steadily climbing, and my HR was steadily climbing to match it, but both of them felt right for this point in the race. I kept my pace consistent through the last mile, and had enough juice left in the tank — just barely — to kick hard for the final stretch.

That pacing is what I am proudest of, in fact: I did hold myself back early on, and therefore did have enough left to finish with the exact same kinds of lap times in the home stretch that I started out with. Boston is a famously difficult course to run (gap-adjusted) even splits on. But — excepting the bathroom stop — that’s exactly what I did.

I’m really, really happy with this one. I am proud of the work I did in 2025 to qualify for Boston, and even prouder of the work I did to get back to full health so I could use that spot in a way I’m proud of. I am happy to be back in good health, and pleasantly surprised at just how fast I was able to go. Lord willing, I will be staying healthy this time: my Pilates routine is becoming, in the best way, routine.

And hey, as I said at the top, I (presumably) qualified for Boston 2027 as well as the other 2027 US Major Marathons! Now for a week of rest and easing back into things, and then: onward.

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Notes

1. A mild annoyance, and if I do this again I’d find a different hotel, but it got the job done. ↩︎