Reaching Race Day

It’s Saturday, April 19 and I’m waiting for my flight to Boston to depart, two days before race day. I learned from my last destination marathon that I should probably give myself a buffer day since Murphy’s Law caught up with me last time. It turned out to be a smart move because just after closing the cabin door, the captain said, 

“The maintenance issue is worse than we thought, and we don’t have a clue how to replace the part that fell off the plane between Seattle and Denver. We’ll give you an update sometime between now and next week. But we’ll allow you to deplane because we don’t have enough overpriced food boxes that we can’t even give away for free because we are broke.” 

OK, I think I may have taken some liberties with that quote, but it’s really not far from the truth. I guess I should just drive to all my races from now on. Only two and a half short hours later we were airborne. Thankfully, the two-hour time zone difference didn’t leave me too tired when I finally arrived at my Mile 24 Brookline hotel around 1am ET. (Thanks Aunt Mary for letting me stay at the condo!) 

Easter Sunday didn’t seem to exist in Boston this year. Maybe it was because I was staying in Brookline, and let’s be honest, there’s a different demographic around Coolidge Corner, and we happen to not celebrate Easter. But in reality, I think there was a second, more important holiday this year. . . Marathon Monday!  Everyone’s Sunday best was replaced by running shoes and Marathon jackets. There were white, blue, and yellow versions from previous races, and there were the easily identifiable tangerine orange and blue striped version that would forever identify them as a 2014 Boston Marathon participant. I wasn’t convinced that I would purchase this year’s jacket until I arrived at the Hynes Convention Center that morning. When I saw the racks and racks of safety cone colored gear, I knew I had to have it to commemorate the race.

The Official 2014 Marathon Jacket that is hard to forget!

My trip to Hynes also included retrieving the all-important race number that made me and 36,000 other people instant Boston celebrities for a few days. It was like having an all-access backstage pass to the greatest rock concert of all time. I wasn’t alive for Woodstock, but I think we had more fans than Jimi Hendrix come race day. It was a shame to hear later that people had “hopped the fence” by photocopying other people’s numbers from pictures they found on the internet. I guess there will always be Boston bandits, but let’s just hope they at least paid the normal entry fee to a local charity. (Shout out to Mandy for that brilliant idea!)

My ticket to temporary stardom.

I was only a couple of blocks from the finish line when I left Hynes, but I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go see it just yet. That was reserved for tomorrow, race day. Besides, it was only a stripe of paint until you put in the work to turn it into a finish line.

Honestly, how cool are these mannequins?

Next chapter: Getting to the Starting Line