Less thanTwo weeks to Boston

Get your parade wave ready. This is basically my approach to running the Boston marathon. It is a victory lap for the marathon runners out there. Though the qualifying standards have been eased a bit over the years, the reality is still that you can't just sign up for the Boston marathon. You have to earn it. For most people, myself included, this fact makes the trip to the Hopkinton start line that much sweeter.
The first time I qualified for Boston, it was a real chore getting there. I raced the Shamrock marathon in VA Beach to drop 20 plus minutes off my previous marathon PR. The only bummer was that I qualified in March and had to wait 13 months to race the marathon. When I finally got to race day, I was so psyched I could hardly stand it. The race weekend was a blur. You tell yourself to rest and stay off your feet but it is amazing how hard that can be. The expo is huge, as is the buzz leading up to Patriot's day.
Back to the parade wave. My feeling in '08 still holds true today- this is a celebration of a race to toast all the work I put in to get to that place. I worked so hard to prepare that I felt I should celebrate that fact. The race was the perfect venue since the vast majority of the other people there had done the exact same thing. When you are racing, it is easy to put your head down and just focus on your pace/nutrition/strategy etc such that you do not really experience the surroundings. I made the point in my first Boston to take it all in. Again, my mindset was that this was something I had earned so I was going to enjoy it! Not to say that I was high-five'n all the Wellsley girls but if you can't at least smile and wink at a few then what the hell! It is a great race with much history. The feeling of starting with a corral of 1,000 similarly paced runners is pretty cool. Cool, that is until you blow through the first mile under six minutes. Ouch.
So, to Angela, to Bill, to Roo, to Nick, to Timmy, to maybe Chris, to maybe Isabelle, to Elyse, Naoko and all the other runners, let's take a moment to celebrate while in Boston. We have put in the work to get to Boston. We deserve a victory lap. Be a warrior out there, especially up to that left turn on Boyleston St......