On coming in (almost) last in the Boston Marathon
You don’t really think about this unless you’re going to be that person, but someone has to be the last runner to finish the Boston Marathon. This year, there was a good chance that would be me.
I’ve completed nine Bostons since 2005, including the bombing year, the hot year, the rainy year, the sunny year, and a bunch of other years. But none of that kept me from two Did Not Finishes, due to dehydration, in 2021 and 2022.
I’ve been chasing the dream of a 10th all this time while, to use Bill Belichick’s too perfect phrase, mistaking experience for preparation.
Would I really come in last? If I finished at all?
That’s what I was asking myself at mile 11, halfway between the sites of my two ignominious removals of my race number over the last two years.
Marathoning, I’ve come to realize, isn’t a sport — it’s a condition. It does not make your life better; it takes you from your family for hours at a time, it facilitates the dubious exchange of knee cartilage for metal, and the people who do it, in the felicitous phrase of my marathoning mentor, Charlie Monahan, are “pavementally impaired.”
And yet.
You can opt into no other sporting event at this level. You can’t sneak into the Super Bowl dressed like a Kansas City Chief and expect that quarterback Patrick Mahomes will throw to you. You can’t creep into the Churchill Downs paddocks and gallop your way through the Kentucky Derby.
Yet when you run Boston, you’re doing the same thing at the same time, roughly, as the greatest athletes in sport, on precisely the same course, and you receive the same finisher’s medal at the same finish line. Glorious.
Last Monday, I was doing just fine until mile 11, when my brain went foggy and I had to ask myself, Why am I out here?
And that’s when I met another runner, Father John Predmore.
He’s a Jesuit priest specializing in uplifting people including the homeless and others at risk of bad outcomes. And for the next 10 miles, he made it his mission to get me to the firehouse just past the 17mile mark, and then through the Newton Hills, and on to the Brighton downslope toward Boston.
We spoke of theology. We spoke of issues in his religion and mine. We spoke of society at large, and together we stayed, if you will, Boston Strong. He got me out of my haze and back into the finisher’s mindset. Then he faltered, and I carried him, emotionally and spiritually, as he had carried me, to Boylston Street.
And we scampered together, laughing like children, across the finish line.
Pavementally impaired. But happy as two men in their 60s can be.
That’s the real beauty of the Boston — the million and one unseen acts of kindness among the runners and loving interactions with the spectators. Did I mention the time that I neared the finish line after six hours of running only to discover a beautiful woman holding my hand, encouraging and congratulating me?
It was Uta Pippig, three-time consecutive Boston winner. Where else does something like that happen but here?
This will be my last Boston. I’m quitting on a high note, erasing the misery of my two incompletions. I’ve now completed the course 10 times. That’s enough. And although I didn’t finish dead last, I was close enough.