PHOTO BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
People gather at the finish line of the Boston Marathon Saturday.
By STEVE KRAUSE
By the time many of you read this, someone will have already claimed victory in the Boston Marathon.
By the very nature of what competitive running has become today, both the men’s and women’s winners will be elite runners — and they will be people who have had the opportunity to train under optimum conditions, and with optimum resources available to them.
By the time many of you read this, these winners, and the ones who finished in the Top 10, will be long gone from the Copley Square area of Boston. They’ll be in their hotels, out for dinner, and perhaps some of them will have already made it to the airport and onto their flights back home.
Congratulations to them. But with all due respect to them and their skills, they are not the ones who make the race what it is.
The Boston Marathon is now, and always was, about people. Simply people. Men and women (and perhaps boys and girls too) who have to juggle their training around work and school schedules, who have to accept all kinds of weather, compete with traffic, and find their own resources and remedies for the aches and pains that come with preparing for a 26-plus-mile race.
I’ve covered this race for more than half my life. The first time I covered it, the finish line was still at the Prudential Center and the triage center was in the underground parking lot. Back then, runners got a bowl of beef stew for their troubles, and it was 50-50 that some of those poor people wouldn’t be able to keep the meal down.
My first time on the media bus was the same year that Bill Rodgers, “Boston Billy,” won the race for the first time, setting what was then a course record. The following year, it was 96 degrees in Hopkinton and 70 back at Copley Square as a stiff afternoon headwind turned legs into jelly and Jack Fultz was the winner.
Though I’ve never run it (good Lord, no!), I’ve learned a lot about it. The biggest thing is that as much as novices think they can conquer Heartbreak Hill — that series of three inclines that run along Commonwealth Avenue from the Newton line to Boston College — it ends up conquering them. And in some cases, it keeps getting the better of them. Year after year, we watch the race on television and see people going out fast, and we say to each other, knowingly, “he/she is going to fade on the hills.” And they always do.
The race took off back in the 1980s when runners began receiving prize money, to the point where this year, the Boston Athletic Association set the limit at 30,000. A small fraction of that number are the elites who have any shot at all at collecting any prize money. The rest run simply to challenge themselves.
As you can imagine, any race this big has to set time limits. And these days, if you want to qualify strictly on the basis of your time, it can be very difficult. If you’re from ages 18-34, it’s 3:05 for men; 3:35 for women. A 60-year-old man can have a 4-plus time, but forget it if you’re doing that when you’re 40.
But there is another way — and that’s to run for charities. The BAA is pretty liberal about giving out numbers to people who have raised money in advance for charities and causes, and this is one more reason the race has such tremendous meaning for its participants. It’s one reason why millions of spectators of all ages line the route to cheer the runners on.
It’s also one reason why the Tsarnaev Brothers, who detonated two homemade explosives at the finish line four years ago, were especially and historically despicable. How they could possibly justify disrupting an event in which so much good was being done was simply beyond comprehension.
Last year’s race netted $30.6 million in charitable contributions. Let’s hope the figure comes close to, or exceeds, that mark today. But even if it doesn’t, we can at least concede that those who put themselves through this torture, for whatever reason, deserve a hearty pat on the back for it — and copious amounts of food afterward.
Those with ties to the Daily Item circulation area who wish to report their times, and discuss their races, can call Item Sports Editor Steve Krause at 781-632-7609 or email him at [email protected] Monday evening.