19-April-99 Boston Marathon

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The Boston newspapers make it sound as though the Boston Marathon is a major international athletic event. I've never known how much anyone outside of this area, except those heavy into running, pays attention. The marathon goes through Newton, not more than a mile and a quarter from our house, and we make an effort to watch. It seems to be true that many of the best distance runners in the world show up, but mostly it's a matter of the tradition.

I bicycled up to the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Cedar Street from work, and got there about quarter past 1. The runners start from Hopkington at the stroke of noon, with the wheelchair participants starting separately earlier. Many wheelchair athletes had already gone past by the time I got there, and one was approaching as I pulled up. All the spectators applaud for all the competitors at this point, so you can tell when someone is passing from the noise. If you stay for an hour after the first runner passes, the stream of runners is constant and you have to either stop applauding for each one or keep clapping steadily -- which, after all, it seems a little wimpy not to do, since they have been running steadily for that much longer.

Comm Ave is flat for a ways before the runners get to City Hall, but just past there it starts going up hill, and Cedar Street is most of the way up that hill. It flattens out again for half a mile and then starts up the big hill to Boston College that's called Heartbreak Hill. The wheelchair athletes are working pretty hard going up the hill by Cedar, and you have to feel sorry knowing how much bigger Heartbreak Hill is. The lead often changes between the runners, too, going up Heartbreak Hill; today the woman who was second at Cedar started falling behind on Heartbreak Hill and finished seventh.

You can tell when the first runners are approaching from people listening to radio reports of the race, from the state policemen on motorcycles who come along to push spectators back off the road, and from the news helicopters that are circling above the lead runner. Then come a couple of official cars, and then the truck with a giant electronic clock and news photographers standing in the back. They must be on risers, because the sides of the truck slope up towards the front, and there are a lot of people with long long lenses standing in there.

The clock said 1:37 when it went by. That should give me a good idea of when I need to get there next year. Come to think of it, that number sounds familiar from previous years.

The lead runner, of course, is next behind the truck. They must keep driving fast enough to leave him some room without exhaust -- it's hard enough to imagine running 26 miles in clean air, much less behind a truck. This year the lead runner was alone, with a good lead. Last year the leader was in a pack of seven or nine runners. There's no telling.

There's about as much fuss when the first woman runner comes by as when the first runner overall does. Certainly there's as much cheering. You have to tell by the color of the number they're wearing, the noise, and the helicopter, because, frankly, it's hard to tell that the best women marathoners are women at any distance.

And something I like, as a short guy, is that it's not a sport that much favors big people.

The runners who go by within 15 or 30 minutes of of the leaders almost all seem to be going strong. Once in a while there will be someone walking, but if anyone is walking that close to the leaders they must have been running almost all the way to here and just started walking. If you watch for an hour you'll start to see people just dragging themselves along and hoping to finish, but an amazing number of runners look as though they're going to finish just fine.

It's pretty moving to see that much determination up close. Whether or not it's a major international sporting event, it's worth walking or bicycling halfway across the city to see.