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Blazin’ in Beantown

When last week’s column hit print, I was surprised by folks’ reaction to it.

It was about me running the qualifier for the Boston Marathon, and while I figured that’d be enough running columns for a while — maybe even a long while — I was wrong. It turned out my legion of fans (all three of them) wanted to know how things went in Boston.

So, by popular demand …

The marathon was held as always, on Patriot’s Day, in this case April 15, 1974. This was back in the early days of what was called in America “The Running Craze.” There weren’t many recreational runners then, and few of them had run a marathon, so it seemed an accomplishment of epic proportion, which of course it’s not.

There are no secrets to success in any endeavor — including magic. Mostly, it’s just a matter of enough smart training, with a big pinch of good luck thrown in. When it came to training for Boston, I was on my game. I’d run daily for two months, averaging nine miles a day. And while running 63 miles a week seems like a tough row to hoe, it’s really not, of and by itself. What is tough is doing it in an old-time Adirondack winter. Basically, to borrow heavily from the Post Office’s unofficial motto, ya just gotta keep running through snow, sleet, rain, and the gloom of both night and day, which I and my running partner Tom Agan did. So when we showed up on race day we were lean, fit and chompin’ at the bit.

Keeping pace

For me, the race had four highlights, and ironically, the first one took place a half-hour before the race began.

I was warming up and keeping my jitters at bay by jogging back and forth on the road in back of the starting line. Everyone else was doing the same, so it made for a pulsing mob and a sea of faces. I wasn’t paying attention to anything or anyone, but suddenly a guy flashed by me who I thought I recognized. And then he was gone.

When I turned and jogged back, and the guy coming toward me again, I knew who he was. He’d been a cook in the army chow hall in Germany when I lived on base. I remembered him for two reasons. One, he was the only other guy on base who ran in his free time. And, as opposed to me, he was a serious runner, going long distances at a fast clip. Second, he was an Inuit from Kodiak Island. This made him not just hard to forget, but unique.

I stopped him and asked if he was the guy from the chow hall, which he was. He said this was his first marathon and the folks on Kodiak had chipped in to pay his way to Boston. We wished each other good luck and went our separate ways. Oddly, though I remembered him, I never knew his name, so I couldn’t find out if and how he finished.

The next thing I knew, everyone was lined up for the start. Compared to Boston’s field of runners today, which is around 20,000, we had only 1,900. Still, having come from races where 50 runners was a big turnout, it seemed like a huge field to me.

Since the world-class runners began at the head of the pack, I don’t remember how the start was signaled. I only know after a couple of minutes, the peeps in front of me started to move and then Tom and I were moving in the stream.

Our race strategy was based on how much we trained and what we wanted for finishing times. We’d divided the race into three sections. First was the initial six miles, which we were using for warming up. The problem with being with so many runners and spectators is the excitement is contagious, causing you to lose your cool. So if you’re not careful, you’ll jet out, and then a bunch of miles down the road, go into oxygen debt, which can be impossible to recover from — especially if you’ve got another 15 miles or so to go. So we began with a sensible pace, one slower than our normal training pace, and maintained it perfectly by checking our watches all the while.

At six miles, we picked up the pace, and planned to maintain it until 20 miles. Once at 20, we’d see how we felt and could either speed up, slow down, or stay on pace till the end. At least that was our theory. Unfortunately, Tom, who’d injured his foot the previous fall, had the injury recur, and had to drop out at mile 18.

In spite of running with a mob of people and being cheered on by hundreds of thousands of others, I was now on my own. While running with a partner is a real boost, I was all right running solo, since that’s what I’d mostly done for years. So I just put my head down, so to speak, and kept on my pace, getting ready for Heartbreak Hill.

Heartbreak Hill was considered the horror show of the marathon. It comes at the 20 mile mark and all I’d ever heard was what a challenge it was, which may be true for flatland runners. But to anyone who’s trained in the ADKs, it was a cakewalk. In fact, I didn’t know I was even on it till I got to the top and could see the city laid out below me.

Of course, there was a downside to Heartbreak Hill, which was the downhill that followed it. Running up a hill may take more oomph, but running down it will hammer you, from toes to teeth. Luckily, I was in good enough shape and used to running enough hills that I never lost my pace, breath, or cool.

On the last six miles, I had my other three highlights.

The famous and the finish

The first was passing Erich Segal, the guy who wrote Love Story. Love Story was an interesting story, of and by itself. It was exactly what it was supposed to be — a simple, unadorned love story. It sold a gazillion copies and everyone loved it … for a while. Then there was some sort of reaction and disavowal of it, as if it was trash literature and anyone who liked it was a total goober. Call me a goober, if you like.

The second highlight was passing Johnny Kelley. Johnny Kelley was a living legend and arguably the best loved man in Boston. He was also a world-class marathoner with unmatched longevity: He’d won the Olympic Marathon twice, in 1935 and ’48, respectively. He won Boston twice — once in 1935, once in 1945. He ran Boston an unmatched 61 times, his last one at the tender age 84.

When I ran Boston, he was 67, and while I was bustin’ my grapes, to him it was just a pleasure jog. He was in fabulous shape, looked decades younger, and was just floating over the course, waving to the crowds.

But here’s the thing: If you wanted to run Boston with the full crowd in attendance, you had to pass Johnny Sullivan. Why? Because after he went by, the crowd thinned. And why wouldn’t it? Once the elite runners zoomed past, the only reason a true true-blue Beantowner stayed to was to see Johnny Sullivan. While the runners themselves may’ve thought they were hot stuff, to the locals they had the same status as the village idiot of Schlabatkaville.

I passed him at the 22 or 23 mile mark and had enough juice left to pick up my pace all the way to the finish line. And crossing it was my last highlight: I’d aimed for a race time of 3:18, and I finished in 3:18:47.

Boston was the last marathon I ran, but not my last marathon.

I never wanted to train as hard as it took to run a marathon, but I found out I could finish marathons with very little training if I ran/walked them. So that’s what I did over the years, run/walking my last one when I was 65.

After that, I had a hip replacement, and the sawbones said that while I could keep running, he didn’t recommend it, since it could wear the replacement out prematurely. And that ended my immediately running career, once and for all: Compared to the pain of hobbling around with an arthritic hip, the replacement was a blessing — but one I hope to never have again.

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