Can’t get enough
Since retiring from hockey, Bruins great Chara is obsessed with marathons
Running a marathon with three months of training is not normal. Running five more marathons the following year — including three in the span of one month — isn’t normal either. Zdeno Chara isn’t normal. The former Bruins captain — who at 6 feet, 9 inches is the tallest player in NHL history — has run six marathons, a half Ironman, a 50kilometer trail race, and a handful of road races since hanging up his skates in September 2022.
Monday’s Boston Marathon will mark his seventh marathon in the last 12 months. He plans to run No. 8 in London a mere six days after crossing the finish line on Boylston Street.
The kicker? Chara, 47, isn’t just finishing these races. He’s running fast. He dropped a time of 3 hours, 38 minutes in last year’s Marathon — impressive by any standard, but made more remarkable by the fact that it was his first marathon. Since then, he’s shaved 28 minutes off his personal best and shows no signs of slowing down.
“The feeling of crossing the finish line and having fun on the course and being fit and in good shape just gives you the confidence and excitement to sign up for another one,” Chara said.
“Once you’ve done one, you just don’t want to stop.”
After 24 years playing professional hockey, including 13 in Boston, Chara had no interest in taking time off. He didn’t want to enjoy a life without constant physical exertion. He wanted to hit the road.
Chara started running right away — though “started” may be the wrong verb. He enjoyed running to stay in shape during the offseason. When he retired from hockey, the one-day contract he signed with the Bruins included a clause stating “Zdeno must agree to keep himself in good shape and physical condition at all times in his post-retirement.”
Chara’s post-retirement running, however, was different. He wasn’t chasing a goal, and he started to feel himself plateau.
He sought help from Becca Pizzi, a professional marathoner from Belmont. She took one look at the runs he logged and had an idea.
“In three months, there’s a marathon — the Boston Marathon,” Pizzi told him last February. “What do you think about running it?”
Chara was no stranger to the spectacle, but he found the idea of running 26.2 miles “unreachable,” especially with so little time to prepare.
“I wouldn’t suggest just taking three months and training to just anyone,” Pizzi said. “You risk a lot of injury, and it’s really hard to pull off for somebody normal. There was no doubt in my mind that, with his athleticism, he could do it.”
The pair connected with race director Dave McGillivray for some help. McGillivray set Chara up with bib No. 3333 (in honor of his No. 33 Bruins sweater) and offered training advice.
Three months later, Chara and Pizzi crossed the finish line hand-in-hand. It was the start of something ambitious.
“I’ve been running consistently for 12 months, so that itself puts me in a good position to be confident,” Chara said. “Over the course of 12 months, there’s definitely more improvement and more comfort, but not complacency.”
These days, Chara logs an average of 60 miles per week. From running to biking, swimming, and weight training, Chara estimates that he spends upward of 20 hours per week preparing for the next race.
“I don’t get the impression that he goes out for a jog,” McGillivray said. “When he goes out, he is literally working out. It’s real intense and real serious.”
It isn’t difficult to pick him out of a crowd, even in Boston’s 30,000-person field. His stature makes him unique among endurance athletes, who tend to skew on the smaller side — Pizzi is 5-1 and McGillivray is 5-4. It also means his strides are longer, and each step he takes bears more weight.
Chara takes an estimated 1,885 strides per mile, while Pizzi clocks about 2,503. That means Pizzi takes an average of 618 more steps per mile than Chara, and nearly 16,200 more strides per marathon.
“A lot of times, people will assume that if someone’s larger, they’re more likely to get injured,” said Adam Tenforde, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a sports medicine provider at Mass General Brigham. “And that’s not always the case in long-distance running.”
Despite entering the sport with four decades’ worth of physical stress, Chara has remained mostly injury-free.
“I said to [Chara], ‘How do you think that you’re able to do this given you’ve been such an intense athlete all your life?’ ” McGillivray said. “‘You would think that by now your legs and knees and ankles and everything else would have taken such a beating that it would be hard to do this — almost impossible.’ ”
Yet it may have been his hockey experience that made the transition easier.
Skating and running happen on different planes of movement. Skaters push their weight from side to side and in multiple directions, while runners typically limit their movements to forward and backward.
“If you do a sport that involves multidirectional loading at a younger age, it seems to be protective against developing certain injuries to bone,” said Tenforde, who was an AllAmerica runner at Stanford and has completed six Boston Marathons.
Chara’s hockey career likely helped him develop the strength in his muscles, tendons, and ligaments that’s necessary to make a smooth transition into endurance sports. Tenforde described it as a “legacy effect,” meaning Chara could be less likely to suffer common running injuries.
“When he started running, it wasn’t natural, but it was more pain-free because he was strong in the legs,” said McGillivray, who will run his 52nd Boston Marathon this year. “It was almost as if he’s a 20-year-old because his legs were fresh in the sense that he hadn’t really done this kind of running.”
After Boston, Chara, Pizzi, and McGillivray will fly to London for Chara’s second World Marathon Major race. He has plans to complete all six — Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, and
New York are the others — in the coming years.
The turnaround from Monday to Sunday will be tight, especially considering the fivehour time difference, but Pizzi is confident Chara will continue his streak of running faster.
“Normally I would say no, but he absolutely can PR both,” Pizzi said. “If you give him a goal, he’ll do it to a T. He’s so determined.”
With a half-dozen marathons out of the way, Chara has set his sights on competing in Ironmans, which include a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a marathon. His first foray came when he competed in a half in Daytona, Fla., in December. His first full Ironman will be Germany’s Challenge Roth this July.
“There’s something about being a professional athlete that creates an extremophile,” Tenforde said.
As much as it may seem that he’s chasing an impossible standard that he set for himself, Chara’s only goal when he crosses the start line is to reach the finish. Each personal best is merely the byproduct of a professional athlete’s unending desire to compete.
But if Chara continues his trajectory, McGillivray is convinced he’ll be among marathon royalty.
“Pretty soon he’ll be running with Meb, for God’s sake.”