Monday, I ran the 129th Boston Marathon. It’s something like 15 and a half years after my first marathon, and it’s taken me that entire time to get to Boston.

I ran my first marathon back in October 2009, in Portland. I’d tried a spring half marathon and survived it, and found a simple enough training plan to work my way up to a 26.2 mile (42km) distance, running through the rolling Palouse hills beyond the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho. Portland went well enough that I signed up for another the next year, and another the year after that.

For most of a decade I did about one marathon a year, with the exception of a possibly over-ambitious 2012. I trained to survive the distance but not really to manage my pace, and generally didn’t come close to hitting the time I’d need to qualify for an entry to Boston — sort of a universal benchmark for marathon performance. Boston is an old race, and a big one, and its organizers ration space on the race course by setting a minimum performance standard to apply for a registration. The closest I came was 3:14:30 on the 2015 Twin Cities Marathon, 9 and a half minutes too long for my age bracket.

Then I moved to LA, and started running with the Los Angeles Frontrunners. Social workouts are a huge improvement over solo, it turns out, and they come with a lot of peer pressure — the Frontrunners have many veterans of Boston, and conversation at group runs usually turns to upcoming race plans. I started choosing my annual marathons with an eye to course speed — net downhills, comfortable running surfaces — and training for speed and strength and pacing in a systematic way.

I ran the lovely gentle downhill course of the 2023 Mountains 2 [sic] Beach Marathon from Oxnard to Ventura, California, in 31 whole seconds less than the Boston threshold; and then that wasn’t enough to win a registration. A “Boston qualifying” time lets you apply to register, but then if more people apply than the race can accommodate, the organizers set a lower cutoff threshold for registration. In 2023 I needed to be about five minutes faster for that second cut.

I came back around the next June, for the Light at the End of the Tunnel Marathon, on a rails-to-trails path through Snoqualmie Pass above Seattle, Washington — green and cool in the shadow of the Cascades, and a nice gentle downhill grade. That, and my training, got me to 3:02:21, fast enough to survive the second-round cut when I applied for Boston in the fall.

Training up for a marathon run in late April was going to be challenging anyway — who wants to start workout runs in December? — and between the natural and political disasters of this spring, I did not turn in the my best preparatory performance, by a fairly long shot.

The Boston course, through a series of small New England towns to downtown Boston, turns out to be very pretty but sort of brutal. It starts with a long descent that makes an over-fast start feel like no effort, then transitions to gentle but relentless rolling hills cresting to a big climb at “Heartbreak Hill” around mile 21. And it’s all on pavement; I trained on much tougher topology in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, but almost all of it nice soft trails. So by the top of that last big climb my legs were dead and I didn’t have much left to give. I walked a fair chunk of the home stretch — though I did manage to save enough effort for a jog on the final mile, and my finish time was far from my worst-ever. (Though also, this was the first event in a while where I’ve been in the slower 50% of my age bracket!)

I’m happy I did it, though. The course was lined with cheering crowds truly the whole way, a level of community support I’ve hardly ever seen. (Maybe in the Twin Cities?) And Boston is convenient for family — Mom and Dad drove up from Lancaster County, and my brother and sister-in-law drove in from the suburbs with my nephews, and of course C flew out to almost literally catch me at the finish.

Once you’re in shape to run the distance, running a marathon is mostly about pace management, knowing what effort you can give and metering it out. That’s more or less what I’ve ended up doing with my preparation for Boston 2025; the result is far from my best marathon performance, good enough as a race experience. The real work, and the accomplishment, was getting to the start line.