BOSTON, LIKE its big
brothers and sisters on the marathon circuit, is really two races. The media
race you see on television and read about in national newspapers and magazines
doesn’t much resemble the people’s race you can only see live and in person.
For the first time in
eight years, I saw both races in 1990. I watched one on TV near the finish line
and the other from the sidewalk, and had a hard time connecting the two events
happening in the same place and only an hour or so apart.
Reporters at the Boston
Marathon do what they must. They tell about a tiny minority of runners, because
that’s what the majority of viewers and readers want to know.
This focus gives a
one-sided look at the Boston Marathon. It makes front-runner matters (along
with financial and legal/political matters) sound like everyone’s main concern.
The 1990 race raised
again the ongoing argument over Boston’s record status. The sponsor’s
spokesman, David D’Alessandro, commented on the national governing body’s rule
that bars the Boston point-to-point course as a record site. He insulted the
rule-makers who know running and care about it as more than a publicity vehicle
for a company.
Joe Concannon of the Globe asked D’Alessandro what would
happen if a world record were set that day. The Hancock official said, “I think
the scenario will be that all the scientific guessers will take out their
rulers and tell us why it is not a record. There will be about 17 people in the
world who believe them.
“Whoever sets that
‘non-record’ will find themselves worth another $100,000 on the circuit. If
someone runs a 2:05, the headlines will blare, ‘World Record Set at Boston’.”
Money and headlines:
Those are the exact reasons why the rule-makers must guard the integrity of its
record book. Records are worth too much to be broken cheaply.
I’d spoken out on this issue
earlier, in the Boston Globe. As one
local running organizer phrased his greeting on race weekend, “Your name is mud
in this town.” I worried that a question/answer session at the expo would turn
ugly.
But in an hour of
questions, this one never came up. None of the supposed big issues did. No one
asked how the media race might go; this wasn’t that type of crowd.
These were the paying
runners. They pay their way to Boston, buy their shoes and subscribe to
magazines. Their concerns differ from those of the paid runners, the sponsors
and the reporters.
I watched the media race
on TV, enjoyed it but felt as distant from it as if watching from across the
country. As that race wrapped up, the other one was just starting.
I elbowed into a spot on
the curb, two blocks from the finish line. Here, my name wasn’t mud. It meant
nothing. I was just one more drop in the sea of faces that the runners saw.
While recognizing very
few of these runners, I knew them all. I knew them by where they had come from
in the last three or four hours (as well as in the training that had made this
racing possible), and by what they were feeling now. Without knowing their
names, I felt close to these people as they finished Boston’s other race.
CHRIS HAZEN is my
Barbara’s son, and he had something to do with bringing the two of us together.
In the mid-1980s, I spoke in a University of Oregon journalism class of hers.
Afterward she came forward and introduced herself.
Then she said, “I have a
son who does some running. Where can I find one of your books to give him?”
I handed her the one I’d
used as a prop that day. “Here, let me sign this for... What’s his name?”
Chris was then a
freshman at Boston University. He hadn’t competed on any high school or college
team, but had run as far as a half-marathon during Outward Bound training.
In 1990, just before
graduating from BU, he wanted to run the Boston Marathon without trying to
qualify. He would jump in as a “bandit,” which is what local college students
do there.
He asked me for a
training program, but we never discussed how closely he followed it. On race
day he started at sub-seven-minute pace and finished with 10-minute-plus miles
for a total time of about four hours.
I thought this would
have cured him of long-distance running. But as his work took him to Hong Kong,
he joined the Hash House Harriers and another running club.
He announced, “Now I
plan to run the Macau Marathon. I’m training well and would like to qualify for
the 100th Boston.”
A tall goal, since as a
27-year-old male he faced Boston’s highest entry standard: a 3:10. Hoping he
wasn’t setting himself up for disappointment, I sounded a note of caution. Even
a time a half-hour slower than his goal would be impressive under the
circumstances.
Chris might have taken
my conservative tone as a challenge. His first communication with us after the
marathon wasn’t the usual call or email.
Instead his told-you-so
response was perfectly understated. He simply faxed his finisher’s certificate.
I couldn’t have been more surprised, or pleased, with his time of 3:07:43 if
I’d qualified myself.
Photo: My future
stepson Chris Hazen became a Boston marathon veteran at age 21.
[Many books of mine, old
and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks
from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home
Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow
Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We
Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]
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