the runner eclectic

Leading up to the 1984 Boston Marathon, I didn’t have enough experience to know that the worst thing you can do when you’re a couple of weeks out from a race is to start reading random articles in running magazines telling you how to prepare for the big day. With an excess of mental and physical energy as the result of tapering, you are especially vulnerable to other people’s theories and the almost irresistible urge to try new stuff — exercises, stretches, massages, acupuncture treatments, diets for carbo-depleting or loading, different drinks, etc — just when you should be sticking to the routine of what you’ve been doing all along.

I fell victim to the idea — picked up from Runner’s World or some other equally suspect source — that it would be a good idea to do some fast 200s in the week before the race. I didn’t stop to consider that I hadn’t been doing anything fast all winter, nor did I have a clear idea of what I was trying to accomplish. Nevertheless, on the Tuesday before the marathon I went out to a nearby golf course and ran some really quick 200s on grass. I’m sure they were impressive, in their own way. Unfortunately, the next day my hamstrings and quads were really sore, and they remained sore for several days. By Monday, I didn’t feel sore anymore, but those several days had been a huge worry, and had left me feeling oddly disconnected from my body.

That was one mistake.

Another mistake was deciding to wear the lightest possible shoes for the race itself. This decision, perhaps exacerbated by the ill-advised strides and the raw weather (it was cold and drizzly right up to the start), almost certainly compromised my quads, which essentially stopped working after twenty-one miles. This was a specific instance of a more general obsession I had going into the race of running the fastest possible time. I had run 2:36 in my debut and, having trained much harder for this second marathon, I figured I would easily go under 2:30.

But my biggest mistake was failing to appreciate the specific logistics of the start and the first few miles of the race. Simply, I had not realized how crowded it would be. In my mind, I had imagined that I would run at a particular pace, just as in any other race. It always took a few seconds to get up to speed; I knew that. But I didn’t imagine that I would be WALKING, trapped in the middle of a crowd of runners who seemed indifferent to the urgency of getting to Boston as quickly as possible.

You have to remember that the depth of the Boston Marathon in the mid-80s was extraordinary. The qualifying time for open men was 2:50. I had run 2:36, and that time had earned me a bib number in the high 500s. There were a LOT of fast runners in the race, and if I hadn’t been so impatient, I would have let them carry me along at whatever pace they chose. Instead, finding myself shuffling down Route 135 at what felt like 8-minute pace, I panicked, and starting looking for any opening to improve my position. I began darting out and around runners, now accelerating to find a seam in the phalanx, now slowing up to avoid clipping the heels of the runner in front of me. Thus did I spend prodigally the glycogen currency that might have sustained me in my all-too-near hour of need.

With all this pointless jockeying for position, I was still sure that the first mile would be a minute slower than I had hoped to run. Instead, as I passed the clock, I saw that it was just over six minutes. Not so bad, I thought, as I continued weaving around slower runners.

As I was committing suicide by fartlek back in the pack, Geoff Smith was running the race of his life at the front of it. On the TV broadcast, you can see Smith’s arms pumping like a half-miler and his cheeks puffing out white clouds into the cold, dreary April afternoon. Smith, who had finished a heart-breaking second to Rod Dixon in the NYC Marathon the previous fall (after leading until just past the 26-mile mark), would run 2:10 that day, winning by over four minutes. He would win again in 1985 in a much slower time, becoming the last man to win Boston before the prize money era. For Smith, Boston 1984 would turn out to be the high point of his career.

In the women’s race, New Zealand’s Allison Roe, who had held the world’s best before Benoit destroyed it at Boston 1983, went out hard and built up a lead that grew to over a minute against fellow New Zealander Lorraine Moller. I never saw Roe during the race, but for many miles I was running near enough to Moller to see the typical crowd of male runners who used to attach themselves to the lead women. I was still near her at twenty miles, but after that our races would go in opposite directions.

When asked about her lightning fast splits for the early miles after the 1983 race, Joan Benoit had smiled and quipped “What splits?” Unlike her, splits were very much on my mind in 1984, and help explain everything that happened later. After my 6:05 first mile, I sped up a lot. I reached 5 miles in 27:50, meaning that I had run miles 2-5 at about 5:27 per mile pace, sixteen seconds per mile faster than the pace needed to break 2:30. I had no idea at the time, but by five miles, my fate was sealed and the rest of the race was now set to unfold like a Greek tragedy. But I didn’t notice or think about it because, finally, I had running room, and for a few miles, I felt like things were back on track. In this temporary state of grace, I ran through Framingham and then Natick where I noted my 10-mile split of 56:00.

The first time I felt that something wasn’t right was at a point just after 11 miles when it suddenly seemed that the runners around me were pulling away. Although I thought I had been running fairly strongly, suddenly going up a very small hill, I felt like I had to work quite hard to maintain my place in the pack. In fact, I was starting to slow down, and I had a long way to go.

I passed halfway in 1:14:15, and made my way through Wellesley, but as I descended the long hill into Newton Lower Falls, I began to experience sharp stabs of pain in my quads. My stride was starting to deteriorate, and, as a consequence, I was using more and more energy to less and less advantage. Having bottomed out on the course, I passed 16 miles in 1:31, and from the way I felt running up the modest hill up and over Route 128, I knew without a doubt that I was in big trouble.

My family had come to Boston to watch me, and like so many other friends and relatives, had chosen a viewing place near the Woodland T Stop that would allow them to watch me go by, and then meet me at the finish. As I passed Newton Wellesley Hospital, I began scanning the faces in the crowd. Suddenly I saw my brother Jeff, and yelled out his name. He saw me and yelled out my name, and then I was past him. I had meant to say so much more, to let him know that I was falling apart, but even if there had been time to say something, I doubt I could have come up with the words to express the certain knowledge I had that these were the early stages of breaking down completely.

After I passed my family, I focused all of my thoughts on getting up and over the Newton Hills. For me, that was the farthest point on my mental horizon. I simply couldn’t imagine anything beyond the crest of these hills. The hills, I felt, were finite. Each one hurt a little bit more than the last, but I was still maintaining the semblance of a running stride, and my quads didn’t hurt so much going uphill. I passed 20 miles in 1:55:20, and threw what was left of my reserves into getting up and over Heartbreak.

In the TV broadcast, the stationery cameras on the Boston College side of Heartbreak Hill show Lorraine Moller motoring along on her way to catching Allison Roe and winning the race. The fast-starting Roe would suffer hamstring cramps at 24 miles and wouldn’t finish. That race pretty much marked the end of her competitive career.

After Moller passes, the camera remains on the road and just before the broadcast switches to the Men’s leaders, you can see me come into view wearing a red knit cap against the cold and running gingerly down the gentle incline grimacing with every step. The first time I saw that footage, I remember thinking that it was a pity the race hadn’t been 22 miles instead of 26.2. I’m not the first person to have had that thought.

I stopped and walked for the first time at 22 miles, just before Cleveland Circle. As I write those words, I can’t really remember all that I was feeling at that point. If there’s a memory in my brain somewhere, it seems to be locked away to prevent unauthorized access. I know that I was disappointed and I know that I was embarrassed because so many people were passing me (such a lot of people passed me that day). I remember that people in the crowd kept trying to get me to start running, and that I did try to start running, and hated those people. Why wouldn’t they leave me alone? I remember taking orange slices from kids and seeing their eyes go wide. Did I really look that bad? I remember that those last four miles took a long time… about 34 minutes, in fact.

After it was all over, after I had finished in 2:41:44 and had been wrapped in a space blanket, I managed to find my way from the finish to the Prudential Parking garage where my family and I had arranged to meet. My memory of those twenty minutes after crossing the line is completely blank. I simply have no recollection of what happened. The next thing I remember is my family standing around awkwardly while I sat against a wall and wept from exhaustion and disappointment. I had tried so hard and for so long, that I just didn’t have anything left to keep back the tears.

If nostalgia is defined as a wistful or sentimental desire to relive the past, then no, I’m not nostalgic about my first time running the Boston Marathon. At the risk of understatement, it wasn’t an easy race for me. But thirty years on and watching all the preparations for the 2014 race, I’ve been thinking a lot about that cold, wet April day in 1984 and how it changed the whole trajectory of my running career, and changed me in other ways, too.

It’s surprising when I think back to those days and realize that I was already entering my second marathon even though I had been back running for only a year or so. Of course, I had run a lot in high school; track and cross country had meant the world to me, then. But after graduation I soon  turned my attention to other things and left competitive running behind. It would be nearly seven years before I took it up again.

It wasn’t until late 1982, the year that Ann and I graduated from college and moved to our little apartment on Gordon Road in Brighton, that I started running again with any consistency. I had gotten my first real job working at a small electronics company in the Fort Point Channel area. One of my colleagues there was in the habit of running at lunch almost every day, and I started joining her for four-mile circuits of South Boston. I found the routine easy and agreeable.

In early 1983, Ann brought me a flyer for a 7-mile road race that would start and finish a block from our apartment. It seemed very exciting, and so I entered the race and put a crude calendar on the refrigerator to keep track of my daily runs. With five weeks to train for the race, I started doing longer runs on the weekend by myself. My cardiovascular system responded quickly to this training, and I noticed that I was doing all my runs a lot faster. Meanwhile, my colleague at the electronics firm had left the company, and I was now doing my lunchtime runs alone, heading down to South Boston, running along the ocean and out around Castle Island.

That first road race started and finished at the East End House on Allston Road in Brighton, with most of the course along the Charles River. I don’t know how I managed to pace myself, but the race went well. Although I finished several minutes behind the winner (a professional looking runner with a Saucony Racing Team singlet), I managed to crack the top ten, which seemed quite good to me. I think Ann expected that after this one race, the whole running thing would be out of my system, but of course it had the opposite effect. I couldn’t wait to race again.

I was also becoming more aware of what was happening in the wider world of road racing. I remember meeting Ann in Coolidge Corner to watch the 1983 Boston Marathon. 1983 was the year that Greg Meyer won in 2:09:00 (the last American to win Boston), and Joan Benoit ran a world best time of 2:22:43. The sight of Meyer and Benoit and all the other runners streaming down Beacon Street toward the finish at the Prudential was unforgettable and inspiring, and in a moment I had resolved to be part of the race the next year.

Running aside, the months that followed were an incredible time in our lives marked by a series of life-changing events over a very short time period. In July, I switched jobs and started working as a technical writer at a small but influential software company, a choice that would define the next twenty years of my career. In August, Ann and I were married. That fall we moved to an apartment in Newton. On January 4th, 1984, Joni was born.

And through this time, I kept running. I ran the morning of our wedding and on our honeymoon, getting up early so that I would be returning from my run when Ann was getting up. My runs got longer. My weekly mileage got higher. I was just making it up as I went along, but it was working for me. That fall I entered my first marathon, the long-since-forgotten Bostonfest Marathon that started and finished at Boston Common with loops out Storrow Drive and down past Jamaica Plain and the Arboretum. I was fairly terrified of the distance, and ran cautiously in the beginning. This turned out to be a good strategy, and in spite of my inexperience, I managed not to blow up much.  Although wobbly-legged and dehydrated from not drinking enough during the race, I crossed the line in 2:36:00, well under the qualifying time needed to enter the Boston Marathon in the spring. I was elated.

When Joni arrived in January, I half expected that it would be the end of my running. I had no clue what it would mean to take care of a baby, but I knew that everything might change, including having the time to indulge my running hobby. A few days after Joni was born, I went for my first run since we had brought her home from the hospital. I remember the feeling of astonishment and relief that it was still possible to do such a thing. Now, thirty years later, it tickles me to think that Joni is the real marathoner in the family.

As I became more accustomed to being a dad, I also got back into training for Boston, and I started looking for opportunities to train with others similarly obsessed. At some point that winter I heard about a running club that did indoor track workouts at MIT, and that led me to join the Cambridge Sports Union. I did my first race for the club in February 1984 at the Amherst 10-miler, running around 54 minutes. A few weeks later, I ran the Boylston 30K and finished 4th overall, averaging about 5:30 per mile for 18.6 hilly miles. I didn’t know it then, but running that race five weeks before Boston was probably the first of a series of serious mistakes that would doom my marathon effort.