Saturday long run on the Boston Marathon course

COVID-19, “ The Rona Era”

Today is the second Saturday that I am running on the Boston Marathon route. I paid my money, so I’m running the course on April 18th. I’m looking at this opportunity as a way to train for my last two half marathons this year, State #48 and #49 and I see this as a research opportunity. I learned that if you qualify for the Boston Marathon or if you are running to raise money for a charity, you still have to pay the $370 entry fee. That blew my mind. Image 20,000 runners paying close to $400. BAA. gets close to 8 million dollars. I’m not even adding hotels and transportation to get to the race.

Training for the Marathon, many of the local runners run the Boston Marathon route. Most people start at Mile 20, which is the heartbreaker running store. Along the route, many organizations have tents or tables with water, fuel, and other things runners will need. There is lots of support. There are so many runners on the route on Saturday.

My thought : how do people, know this is a thing, a ritual? If you signed up to run, how would you know that every Saturday runners are training on the course? I saw three black men and two black women running on the course this morning. I was there from 7-9:20a.m. I can count on one hand the Asian-Americans that I saw. By my eyeball count, I saw more women than men on the course.

I arrive at Mile 20 at 6:55a.m. I had a fuel belt with water and some energy snacks. My mistake was wearing old/new shoes. They were very heavy. It’s time to order new shoes because my regular running shoes were on their three month expiration date of usage.

We had a snow storm on Friday. The streets and some parts of the sidewalk on the route were not shoveled. I had to run in the streets or on the sidewalk. I had to run gingerly in some parts because I did not want to fall or slip while running. I was cautious on the run.

At one point, I stopped and put my run tracker on pause while I took a picture of a black lives matter sign. I thought I resumed the tracker. Two miles into the run after my pause, I saw that my tracker was still on pause. Ugh.

Of course that would happen. I was running the same route as last week, so I knew I was running a 10 mile route. I just needed to go a mile further for my 11 mile goal.

Slow, steady, and strong is what I kept doing.