Monday, April 21, 2008

Boston Marathon 2008

It was a fabulous day. The weather was perfect.
I had some problems getting to the start. My daughter Julie was driving us and the car lost power. The EVC sensor light was on the dash. Tiffany and Sam and Katie also came to see me run. They spent most of the day at a VW dealer in Worcester and didn't see me run.
I rode the bus for about an hour with Carl from Pennsylvania who was running his 22 Boston. He started in 1974 and had also run 7 NY marathons.
I found a friend in the village, Karen Farnum. WE had worked together a while back. She was running more miles in a week Than me (about 56 on average) and I encouraged her to run some longer races. She qualified for Boston by running the Hartford Marathon in 2007. WE talked and went to the corrals together.
The race was OK. I felt good and started at 7.0 mph. I was at 7.2 mph by mile 5 and slowly went to 7.4 by mile 9. I stayed there until mile 21 when my GPS stopped reading.
The end result was a 3:40:00 8:24/mi. 9294 overall. I was a little disappointed because I really felt I could run between 3:32 and 3:36. But I did qualify for Boston next year. After I got sick 3 weeks ago I really lower my expectations and my goal became qualifying for Boston with my Boston time.
I guess I'm getting old. I enjoyed the race and although I think I could have run faster I was happy to run well and enjoy the people and the fans.
There really is no race I would rather run than Boston.

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