PHOTO: BOB ROCHE
Karen Dilisio will run in her sixth Boston Marathon on Monday.
By STEVE KRAUSE
LYNN — Karen Hanscom Dilisio will run in her sixth Boston Marathon Monday. And she has advice for anyone who wants to take part in the iconic race.
“Do your homework,” said Dilisio. “Do your training. There are no shortcuts.”
Dilisio, whose sister is Patricia A. Capano, Lynn School Committeewoman, began running the race for the Spina Bifida charity, in honor of her nephew, Nicholas, Capano’s son.
For the past five years, she’s participated under the banner of the Boston Police Runner’s Club, which helps fund a charity for officers whose children have cancer.
“What I’ve learned, is that you get out of it what you put in,” she said. “When you’re in that corral, and you’re about to start, you either trained or you didn’t. Shortcuts will get you shortchanged.”
Anyone looking for tips from Dilisio about race strategies won’t find any. To her, there’s no substitute for the grueling grind of the lengthy weekend runs. The longest one takes her from her home on the Lynn/Salem line all the way to Wakefield’s Lake Quannapowitt and back.
“That’s 11 miles up, and 11 back,” she said.
This involves sacrifice.
“Of course,” she said. “There are so many things. I have a house, I have a family. If I’m going to get up on a Sunday morning and do 18 miles, I not staying out late, or up late. Everything I do is basically geared to training.”
But if it’s a sacrifice for Dilisio, it’s a labor of love. She’s said she’s so excited about the prospect of running next week, “that talking to you makes me want to go right out and run now.”
The key, she said, is to train properly. Her mentor is longtime marathoner Paul Quinn of Lynn, who, she said, often reassures her that she is training properly. Runners, she said, have to have the confidence in their regimens so that on race day you can just go out and have fun. “
You’ve already done the hard part,” she said. “Enjoy the race.”
But what about Newton’s hills? The collection of inclines from the turn onto Commonwealth Avenue from Route 16 to Boston College, are known as Heartbreak Hill. And they separate the wheat from the chaff.
“The race really begins there,” she said. “That’s where the fun starts.”
Dilisio’s strategy is as uncomplicated as the rest of her race philosophy.
“Look down when you’re going up the hills,” she said. “Don’t look up.”
Often, the other side of those hills can be just as hard on the body as ascending them, and that’s especially true if your hamstrings are among your body’s most vulnerable parts.
Hamstrings are Dilisio’s most vulnerable parts of the body.
“Paul taught me you have to run in short strides going down those hills because it takes less out of your hamstrings,” she said.
It isn’t that Dilisio is too carefree about the race. It’s just that she’s passionate about running it, and channels her late father Paul Patrick Hanscom when she does it. She’s often run with the initials PPH on her jersey, and one of his enduring philosophies on life fuels her.
“My father always said, ‘when you start something, finish it.’”
That’s why she’s so single-minded about training in all kinds of weather, alone, to get to the starting line. And, she said, part of her focus is her own.
“It’s not about the 26.2 miles,” Dilisio said. “It’s the journey. It’s all the things you do to get to that point. I don’t know exactly how to describe the feeling. But when I turn that corner onto Boylston Street, and I’ve done it, and my family is there watching, it is such a wonderful feeling. There are tears in my eyes.”