State of the Unicorn

There comes a time to walk away. There also comes a time to accept that it’s OK for someone else to walk away. I’m not running the Boston Marathon this year. No unicorn this year. Don’t ask me to convince you that I know what I’m saying. I know exactly what I’m saying. Yes, I’m qualified for this year’s race, and yes, I’m entered (and paid for it), and no, I’m not showing up.

This ends a fourteen-year run of qualifying and running every year. It ends my ten-year-streak status that gets me in with a simple qualifying time rather than having to make the time plus the ‘cut-off’ (which makes qualifying harder, being over seven minutes this year). It ends a chapter of my life that frankly, I never expected to happen in the first place, but it was grand, it helped define me, and it will never leave me. Hella’ run.

I’m fine with it. But it’s become clear to me that some of you I’ve spoken with might not be fine with it. Let me be blunt: please get over that. You need to be fine with me being fine with it. Stop being amazed. Stop trying to talk me out of this. I’m thrilled that I’ve had this experience. Be thrilled with me. I’m not dying. I’m good.

First and most importantly, my body says no. Too many parts are saying that it just doesn’t make sense to pile on that additional wear and tear. From here on, I run for fun. I run for joy. I run when I can without too much ensuing damage. But the “hinges” (as a friend I hadn’t seen in years referred to them the other day) are requesting that I don’t punish them further at the moment just to cover the twenty-six into Boston for the fifteenth (official) time. I just don’t need to.

That’s the second part: I’ve nothing to prove. I’m not going to run fifty of these, or forty, or even twenty-five. Any of those numbers are a grand achievement. But so is fourteen. How many people have run fourteen consecutive Bostons – each time as a qualified runner? (Hint: I don’t know, and I don’t care.) I’m thrilled with what’s happened since that first one in ’07, the one that was almost cancelled due to what at the time we thought was an awful storm (oh, if we’d only known what was coming!). I’m thrilled at the levels of success I’ve had along the way. There are no woulda’ coulda’s in my rearview mirror.

The body says that if I push my training hard enough to do anything more than jog the race, various parts will rebel. At the moment, it’s the left Achilles, and also the left knee, but at any given time of late it has been any number of parts. But things have always hurt in the past, right? Given better timing, might I have worked around some of these issues? Sure. This time, though, those aches and pains not only intersected with training, but had I pushed it, would have likely pushed off other life goals. You can’t hike mountains if you can’t even walk, right?

Age? Of course, but that’s not admitting defeat, just management. Wear and tear from years of pounding the pavement? Yep, but I wouldn’t trade those miles for anything in the world. I may have wounds, but I also have the wins, actual, metaphorical, and emotional, and I’m still in fine mettle compared to the average Joe my age. (Have you seen poor Joe?)

So why not just jog it? Take that victory lap? In one word, Delta. And in a few more words, the ratio of Delta to gain.

Don’t get me wrong. The Gods of Boston are trying to do the right things. For this year’s race, you have to be vaccinated or test negative. But wherever you set up a security periphery, there is danger at that edge. You can’t get in to get your bib until you’ve met medical mettle. But you’ll be among crowds to get to the med tent to show your vaccine card or get your test. And those crowds will come from places like Mississippi (with apologies to vaccinated folks in Mississippi, but no apologies whatsoever for the unvaxxed). So you’re still in a crowd, and it’s still, um, Delta. (And oddly, it seems you can go into the expo no matter who you are, but hey, I could be reading that wrong, and I could skip that anyway as there aren’t as many freebies as in the golden age anyway).

So there’s a risk. But life is a risk. We fly, we drive, we eat fast food, and certainly none of us realized the risk of getting blown up in ’13. But we take those risks for reasons. Here, there’s just not that great of a reason.

If I had a chance in hell of re-qualifying for next year, that would tilt the equation. But there isn’t. Running Boston this year was always going to be a joyride, a victory lap. Jog out number fifteen, spend a lot more time high fiving the crowd, maybe soak up the scream tunnel a little more, do those crowd waves, you know, live it up, soak it in.

But why risk it in the age of Delta? Not just me, but why put Dearest Spouse at risk? And Dearest Offspring the Younger, who now being just an hour and a half up the road, we tend to see more often (the Elder being six air hours away is reasonably safe from any foolishness I might propagate). It’s just not worth the risk for a shirt and a fun run, especially when my drawer of shirts runneth over years ago. And the crowd will probably be rather meager anyway.

So let it go. Let the Achilles heal (they take way too long) so I’ll be running in the winter, the spring, and beyond. Make sure I can continue to hang out with my running buds, the best friends one could ever hope for. Ponder that I might be dumb enough to even jog New York next year, since I’ve got a reserved entry thanks to my fourth attempt at running it was again cancelled (and if I register and don’t run it again, I might set a record for not running New York five times – that’s gotta’ count for something, right?).

At the end of the day, Boston is just a race, and I’m not willing to risk “Long COVID” and propagating the next mutation of the virus, let alone the health of my family, for just a race. It’s changed, too. Once the ultimate mecca, the grandaddy, the pinnacle of marathoning, well, it still is, but it’s also become just another product, marketed incessantly in order to expand its brand. Yes, the race almost died in the seventies when prize money emerged at other races and Boston resisted, so yes, you have to keep up with the Joneses at some point, but this year’s pitch for their virtual event shed all semblance of glory and stature. To refresh you, they advertised a virtual event well before they announced what the real event would look like. They offered an absurdly large number of entries – I believe it was seventy thousand, though I haven’t fact-checked my recollection. For a hundred and twenty-five bucks – I kid you not – you could go for a run on your own. A shirt was fifty more. I can’t lie to you: that blatant money-grab lowered their stature in my eyes more than a few notches. This on the tail of last year’s virtual event mobile app which featured pre-loaded glamour photos of supposed participants, which, if real, were amazingly and consistently genetically superior to average-looking marathoners, and which, as a marathon app, failed to cover the basics like measuring the course accurately (it rang up twenty-four for me) and submitting results successfully (I had to do it via email to the support team). It does make you wonder where the priorities lie.

Then there are the realities of COVID. While they are holding the event this year (others are still cancelling, most recently Mount Desert Island marathon which again threw in the towel in the face of pressures on the local medical system due to the virus), it’s not all that much of an event. Unless you’re an elite, there is no start this year. There’s no Athlete’s Village. The bus drops you off in Hopkinton, you walk to the start, and when you get there, you go for a run. We all knew that with chip timing it never really mattered when you started, but the start was the event. Even if you were in the second or later waves, you heard the announcers, saw the flyover, felt the excitement. Now it’s kind of like a garden fountain, buses hauling runners from Boston and dropping them to drizzle back to Boston in a continuous flow. One almost suspects you could get to Boston, get on a bus, and just do it again. All we need is the little statue of Buddha next to the stream as the water trickles down the rocks, waiting to be pumped back to the top.

And not to mention, the community of agony will be gone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve shared snacks, cups, and whole water bottles with my fellow runners. We always instinctively trusted our strong bodies to overcome any passed pathogens. No longer. I wouldn’t even want to be behind someone breathing heavily. Mississippi again (and sorry again to Mississippi vaxxers). And it’s not just me. If the Gods of Boston thought it was safe for you to be close to your fellow runners, there would be a real start. There isn’t, because it isn’t.

So this summer I’ve focused elsewhere. Some cycling again like last summer to be sure, but more toward the mountains, where I’ve wrapped up some significant life-long goals. Within a three-week span I wrapped up the Adirondack 46ers, the Northeast 111, and the New England Hundred Highest summit lists, the latter a truly unique experience, finishing on the Canadian Border at Boundary Peak. (True, when arriving for my annual physical a week later and being asked whether I’d been out of the country, having hiked for three miles along the border – and back – the answer took a little explaining.) Those goals were nearly forty years in the making.

My point is that the restless adventurer soul isn’t going to curl up in a corner and dry up because I stop running one race. I may hang back for a while, let various parts heal, and return at a little lower intensity, but return is most certainly in the cards. Probably not to Boston, but hey, been there, done that. On to the next chapter.