Remembering my first and drunkest Boston Marathons
The 100th running boasted the largest official marathon field in history and ushered in the era of chip timing in mass events; the 102nd provided something funny for my scrapbook
April 15 is a significant date for all Americans connected to the nation’s hilarious system of revenue collection. It’s an easy date for me to remember for other reasons, mainly because it’s my dad’s birthday (Happy 77th!) and also because two of the three Boston Marathons I finished were on April 15. Also, the current holder of the school record for the boys’ 3,200-meter run at my alma mater was born on April 15, twenty years and a couple of months before he set the mark as a junior in 2004—a record that may well fall to an 18-year-old senior in a face mask in 2021.
Twenty-five years ago today, in 1996, I lined up at the Boston Marathon for the first of four times. I’d return in 2001 (on April 21, alas) to set my still-standing and no longer very vulnerable personal record, in 2002 (on April 15) to run what was in context perhaps my best marathon, and in 2003, where I dropped out on a warm day near 12K knowing I had no shot at the Olympic Marathon Team Trials standard on such an afternoon (and all of these races started at noon.)
You won’t find many selfies from this race.
Below is what I wrote about the 1996 race sometime in 2001, not long after I ran my 2:24:17. (It’s hard to believe no one from New Hampshire has run faster than that at Boston since. I’ll offer my report from that race when they actually run the 2021 Boston Marathon.) The Concord Monitor ran a story the day after the 100th running, but I’d have to travel to a library 2,000 miles away and scour the microfilm archives there to find it. It was nice, mentioning a quip about a severe blister; I enjoyed it.
One interesting detail is that I ran this race out of the first corral, but the next three Bostons as a “green-dot” elite, meaning a guy who didn’t belong in the same conversation with the “red-dot” contenders, but whose world-class women’s times gained him the privilege of starting along with a few dozen others just in front of the rope at the front of the first corral; the cut-off was around 2:28:00. In those days, there was a gap of maybe 40 yards between the actual starting line where the elites stood and the rest of us. In 1996, it took me eight seconds to get to the actual starting line after the gun was fired, while in my next three starts, despite the theoretical slight advantage on my 1996 position, it took me either seven or eight seconds each time.
The interesting part to me is that, despite this, the official discrepancies between my 2001, 2002 and 2003 gun and chip times were 0, 5 and 2 seconds. I’m not stewing over the unresolved conflict, just curious from a technical standpoint what causes this (or once did).
Anyway, my twenty-year-old summary:
As a New Englander and a marathoner, there was no way for me to escape the inevitability of the Boston Marathon. You either do it (usually several times, if not annually) or you formulate a suitable excuse for avoiding it. Adding fuel to the fire, 1996 was to be the 100th running of the world's most revered 26.2-miler. The field would be expanded to accommodate close to 40,000 runners, with an attendant surge in the already rabid level of hype the event enjoys every April on Patriots Day. The timing was right, I decided, to throw my hat in the ring. I'd make Boston my third marathon.
I also hoped to make it my fastest. A particularly snowy winter might have disrupted my training had it not been for the availability of Dartmouth's Leverone Field House and the 200-meter track it held. Once March rolled around, I'd been logging 90- and 100-mile weeks, sometimes more, and putting in full-fledged marathon-pace runs of up to 15 miles. I was ready.
I spent the eve of the 100th Boston Marathon 100 yards from the starting line, on the mosaic carpet of the Hopkinton Masonic Lodge. By pure dumb luck, one of my classmates had an uncle who was one of the Grand Poobahs of the lodge, and I received a generous boarding offer while most everyone else in the bloated field fought for hotel space in Boston or resigned themselves to wee-hour excursions that would bring them as close to Hopkinton as traffic constraints allowed. The lodge brothers, fired up beyond all rational standards of anticipation, stayed up all night drinking beer and scuttling sneaks who tried to ease into the parking lot with their lights off in the wee hours (they would rightfully charge a heavy fee later that day for this privilege). It was an amazing tableau. I barely slept a wink, but it was worth it.
Watching the tiny town swell from near-emptiness at 6:30 a.m. (there was no hope of sleeping later than that) to probably 50,000 by 10 a.m. was amazing. The official field of 38,000 runners was the largest in marathon history. It was a blessing that I was able to amble from the lodge to my spot in the first thousand-runner corral in the space of a minute. With helicopters swirling overhead and the raucous buzz of a legion of hopefuls bombarding me from every direction, it was pandemonium. It was easy to forget I was there to race myself into oblivion.
Alas, my race was something of a disappointment. I hit the halfway point in 1:14:10, but never really found a comfortable rhythm, and after a steep downhill near 17 miles I was toast. The only reason I was able to manage a series of knock-kneed, demoralizing 6:30 miles from 20 until the finish line was the presence of the two million ferociously clamoring spectators lining the streets. I wound up at 2:36:10.
That summer, I returned to a regimen of high mileage while I performed my Internal Medicine rotation. I was planning to take another shot at 2:30 at Baystate in October, and with a 10K PR of 32:15 in August I was primed for the task. But when I was unceremoniously whisked out of school in late September, everything ground to a halt. I would run only sporadically until the following May, by which time I'd returned to Concord to assemble a life I'd had no intention of leading.
In the face of tremendous uncertainty, I seized hold of my one dependable lifeline yet again, and starting training in earnest.
While this really offers no flavor about the race—the first truly huge event in which took part—I can’t help but ponder how I would have written the same remembrance from scratch today. I’m impressed with the brevity of some of the sentences and cringing at the use of clichés and trite metaphors, which I now try to avoid like there’s no tomorrow.
Six years later, I was back, having made the mistake of running well the year before and encouraging the local rags to pay special attention to me in advance of the race in 2002. The except posted below—and sorry if this is repetitive—is from a story that ran in New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, on April 16, 2002. Apart from the impressive density of minor errors and a somewhat major but entertaining one, I enjoyed this story; it was nice.
Background: I was a mess going into this having stubbornly relied on bland, donkey-style mileage all winter—I put in 1,400 poorly structured miles in a ten-week period that year—and with no training runs longer than three miles at faster than 5:40 pace. This made running just slightly faster than that pace in the marathon a comparative triumph.
Beck, Miller best in NH field
After sweating out the forecast, NH runners enjoy mild day
BOSTON — Kevin Beck admitted he had overworked himself preparing for the Boston Marathon.
“I got a little bit fried this spring,” the Concord, N.H., resident said. “I strained myself silly for the best of intentions1. I was doing 140 miles a week for 10 weeks.”
Coming from a runner whose intensity level is second to none amongst New Hampshire runners, Beck’s confession was hardly surprising. Nor was his finish in yesterday’s 106th edition of the Boston Marathon. For the second straight year, Beck was the first Granite Stater across the finish line, this time under cool and cloudy conditions for most of the way, until the sun dared to creep out near his finish.
The 32-year-old school teacher’s2 time of 2 hours 28 minutes 35 seconds was four minutes off his 2001 finish, but it was also his third straight Boston under 2:303, as well as his third-best Boston finish4.
The only elite runner from New Hampshire in yesterday’s Boston field, Beck placed 50th overall, 45th among male runners and 39th in the Men’s Open division — down from last year’s 26th-place divisional finish in the country’s most prestigious road race.
Beck knew halfway through the course’s 26.2 miles that last year’s finish was out of the question. “I knew after 13, 14 miles. The signs were there,” he said. “I wasn’t really looking forward to the downhills. I was kind of dreading them. But I held on tough and focused on the things I needed to.”
What Beck needed to do — in addition to protecting his shins on the downhills — was hold off his fiercest competitors from his home state5.
He did.
Beck cited Laconia’s Fergus Cullen, 29, as his main competition. Cullen recovered from a lackluster first 13.1 miles to finish second behind Beck among New Hampshire runners, in 2:38:25 — good for 133rd place overall. Concord’s Chris Carter, 37, as consistent a marathoner as anyone from the Granite State, followed Cullen, in 2:40:19 (175th overall).
Another regular among the top New Hampshire finishers at Boston, North Hampton’s David Bednarek, ran well enough to place fourth in the state standings, but only showing early indications of a much better finish. The 34-year-old, who recently overcame the flu, held second behind Beck until a late-race breakdown that turned a 1:14:47 half-marathon split into a 2:45:06 final time, which dropped him to 260th overall.
There was no such drop for Beck, who had some help from the sidelines. He frequently heard his name cheered by strangers along the way, thanks in part to his status as an elite runner and his easy-to-remember bib number (111). He also had familiar faces at different points on the course.
“I had friends from Massachusetts stationed with bottles of wine and punch at (Miles) 8 and 17,” Beck said6.
Stationed at Heartbreak Hill were college students Beck used to coach.
“I heard my name a lot,” he acknowledged.
The cheers were a small boost that helped Beck overcome his overdose of training.
“I just had to step back,” he said. “I came in here pretty tired. I finished four minutes slower this year. It could have been a horror show compared to that.”
What I actually said was, “I trained myself silly with the best of intentions.” What was printed in the paper was essentially word salad. But given the context, I doubt anyone besides me noticed or cared. Besides, I was apparently too shitfaced to talk (see footnote #6).
I was not a schoolteacher in 2002. No one from the press corps even asked what I was doing for work at the time; had anyone taken this step, I would have told him or her I was employed as a flenser. I’ve always wanted to tell that particular lie.
Wrong. This was my third Boston finish, the others coming in 1996 (2:36:11, 211th overall) and 2001 (2:24:17, 29th overall).
Wrong again. As the above sentence indicates, 2002 marked my second-best Boston finish in terms of both time and place.
Maybe New Hampshire reporters believe this, but it never crossed my mind.
What I actually said was “Hawaiian Punch.” Despite the patent absurdity of the idea of someone finishing a marathon in 2:28 half in the bag, I don’t doubt that some of my friends and acquaintances read that eye-opening line of buncombe and muttered, “Figures.”