Looking back at races I have run
Last week I put an item on my to-do list to fish through my medals and try to figure out what and how many marathons I’ve run. It was an interesting act of impromptu archeology.
People ask me how many marathons I’ve run and I tell them, “I don’t know”, and that seems to trouble people. I never ran races to ‘collect them’ like so many hoarded license plates. I ran races for adventure and to meet people and sometimes just because they happen to sit on the calendar in a particularly fortunate place.
The only marathon I’ve ever had a personal relationship with was Boston. Until recently I only ran other marathons to get back to Boston. Until they changed the qualifying and registration rules I could get away with running a qualifying race once every two years.
I see people on line, young people who have 50 or 100 marathons under their belts. That’s amazing but it also points to a fairly single-minded commitment to racking up marathons. The way I live my marathon life has always been spur of the moment. Even that first one. A friend said “let’s run the marathon”. I said ‘OK” and the rest is history.
Like most of you I started running again to lose weight. I figured 5 miles 3 times a week would be enough to hold the line against the battle of the belly. Then, like most of you, I realized how much I enjoyed running, the camaraderie of it and began racing.
This is where I had an advantage over some because I had run Cross Country in high school and knew the rudiments of running, and training and racing. I was never any good and never considered myself an athlete, but I knew what to do.
I ran my first marathon in 1997. I was 34. I followed the usual trajectory and got serious about it for a couple years. I continued on the same normal course and went through a cycle of injury and recovery, of training and racing.
As I passed 40 and 45 and older I knew in my logical head that I couldn’t keep beating on my body like this forever and I had to find a way to enjoy the races. Every one could not be a pyrrhic effort. With each passing year I looked to the community to find ways to run with friends and enjoy the race. To help pace people and to help charities.
This is the normal progression for our sport.
Back to the beginning of this story I went through my medal rack and wrote down all the marathon medals. Then I compared them to the available archival information on line. Athlinks.com has a pretty good data base of races. If you give them your name, age and location they will search all the results and find (some) of your race history. They even found some now-defunct races that I had run.
Athlinks didn’t find all the races. The BAA has a searchable archive of the Boston Marathons. That only goes back to 2000, but it was still useful to corral my Bostons in one place. .
I managed to find all the races through these sources and the medal rack except for one. I had to send an email to my friend Gordon and ask him “Remember that year we ran Boston together? Remember we ran the BayState marathon that year? When was that?” I think that was the year BayState didn’t get their medals in time for the race. He remembered. It was 2000.
In there I found 2 DNF’s, including this year’s Boston. There were actually 3 DNF’s but one got logged as a half marathon when I walked back to turn in my chip.
And what did I find?
Well it appears I’ve attempted 34 marathon or greater races. I did not finish two of those. That’s means I have run and completed 32 marathons in 16 or so years. Easy math there for an average of 2 per year.
One of those is the Vermont 50 miler that I ran in 2008 as my one and only official ultra-distance race. I’ve only got 11 states, mostly contiguous to New England. My average times seem to be in the 3:20’s if you throw out the outliers.
I’ve run many more 20 milers and 30k’s and half marathons, all while training for Boston.
An interesting phenomenon was the way I remembered times. I remembered my PR at Boston as a 3:06:42. It was actually a 3:06:54, not sure why my subconscious thought that was a reasonable approximation. Probably because 42 sounds a lot closer to 3:06 then 54 does. Even I, who would not, and have no incentive to aggrandize my running history, find I’ve been telling some fish stories that keep getting better as time goes on.
I had forgotten at least one marathon and had discovered some times that in retrospect look pretty good, but at the time I was mortified by!
Here is my report card. What do you think?
