Continuing from Part I….
I slept really well and got up at 6:30 a.m. Our host John had so kindly made me some steel cut oats and coffee for my pre-race breakfast, and I packed a banana for the bus ride up to Hopkinton. Christine drove me in to Boston and dropped me right off at Boston Common at 7:45 a.m. so I could board the bus at 8 a.m. I had to laugh because it looked like a zombie apocalypse with all the people walking across the Common toward the buses! There were plenty of porta-potties for use before boarding the school buses. The volunteers were chipper and helpful and I got on a bus right away — no waiting at all!
I chatted on the bus with a very nice woman who was running Boston for a third time. She echoed the advice I kept hearing: don’t go out too fast in the first five downhill miles or you will regret it on the hills of Newton!
I arrived in Hopkinton around 9 a.m. with plenty of time before my wave #3 was scheduled to depart the Athletes’ Village at 10:50 a.m. I hit up the porta-potty line and this time there really was a line — it took 40 minutes of waiting. By that time I pretty much needed to hop back in line to make sure I could go one last time before the race. So I didn’t even sit down once in the village!
I was happy to sip on some of the Gatorade provided for free in the Village. I unsuccessfully tried to eat the Clif Organic Energy Food sample that was included in the race goodie bag. It was nothing I hadn’t eaten before — oatmeal, bananas, maple syrup. I’m sorry for the bad review Clif, but it tasted like warm, mushy baby food and it was so unpalatable I had to throw it away. Luckily though Clif redeemed itself with a booth in the Village where I gratefully grabbed two free samples of White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Bars, something I already knew I liked and could tolerate before my run. You really could find anything you needed in the Village — in a great spirit of camaraderie people were passing around bottles of sunscreen and leaving things that you could use to sit on the grass.
Before I knew it my wave was being called and it was time to walk a few blocks to the starting corrals. It was sunny and quite warm by 10:50 a.m., in the high 60s in Hopkinton. I was glad I’d worn compression shorts and a short-sleeved tee.
I was in corral 5 and on the way I saw someone wearing her race tank top from the 2015 Phoenix Marathon, so we chatted about how we both qualified at that race. After the starting gun went off it took a while to walk to the starting line from corral 5. On the way I got high-fives from five race volunteers and passed up many more! I should have taken that as a sign of what was to come. Click the link to the next post for Part III of my Boston Marathon 2016 Race Recap!
by Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run Boston with an official bib and a major player in the push to get the women’s marathon into the Olympics in 1984. (Such a #runnerd, I’m tearing up again thinking about it!) Let’s all just take a moment, man or woman, to thank those before us who have helped advance the sport of running. And of course, one of those people is Boston Marathon director Dave McGillivray, author of 
. I’ve listened to him speak on a few podcasts and found his stories to be very inspiring, so I can hardly wait to read his book.
and 
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Fit Fun Mom 