Marathon Monday was always one of my favorite days of the year. The calendar may say spring begins March 21, but those of us who know better celebrate that annual milestone on Marathon Monday.
That’s when spring shows its true colors in Boston. And 30,000 runners fall in behind the budding flowers and trees to form a marvelous parade to welcome back the oncoming gorgeous days.
But it’s also a day to honor human perseverance and toughness on so many levels. Nobody who commits to run 26 miles and 352 yards does so lightly. You have to know there are miles and miles of grueling training — much of it in lousy weather.
Disclaimer: Though I harbored a deep desire to make that commitment and carry it out, I never did. And I can only imagine that the deep satisfaction one gets from crossing that finish line after a miserable winter (especially this year) of running back roads and chilly beaches, is indescribable.
All I know is this: covering that race for more than 20 years, keeping track of local runners, the difficulty they had, and their sense of joy and relief of accomplishing their goals, was truly special. It was certainly a labor of love.
If you’ve spent your professional life waiting for athletes to come out of the shower only to grunt one-word answers to your questions, runners are a unique treat. There are 30,000 of them and they all want to tell you their stories.
Because the 3:30 time limit is often impossible for the average runner, the race has turned into one of the most important fundraisers for area non-profits. If you can raise a specified amount of money ahead of time, your charity will reward you with a number.
These runners tell stories that can be heartbreaking — incidents in their lives that prompt them to run more than 26 miles to raise money for causes that have come to mean so much to them.
Some runners love to relate their training experiences, and tell you what they learned from them.
And then there are others who don’t necessarily do this to raise money. They do it to scratch some infernal itch inside of them that cannot be relieved any other way. It’s like scaling Mount Kilimanjaro or shooting the rapids in Idaho. You just have to do this, and there is no substitute.
Whatever they are, these stories can motivate you into climbing your own hills.
True marathon lovers almost don’t care at all who wins the race. Those who run 26 miles in a little more than two hours are in a vastly different league than most of us.
Thankfully, the marathon speaks to the rest of us, too. Its beauty is that any motivated runner can participate. Anyone can get up at 4:30 a.m. on cold January mornings with minus-10 wind chills, grind it out, rinse and repeat, and be ready to go by the starting gun. Once you get that far, it comes down to how well you know distance running, the weather, the route, and — of course — Heartbreak Hill, which has a way of putting neophytes in their places while reinforcing bitter lessons for the veterans who think they’ve already learned them.
So if you see one of these people between now and Monday, think of all they’ve endured. Think of the little nagging injuries they suffer just to get into position to realize this dream.
This is their ultimate — the crowning achievement.
And just once, I’d like to have been there with them.
