Thanks for the Love, Boston

 Without love, where would you be now?

The Doobie Brothers may not have been asking runners specifically when they pose that question in “Long Train Runnin’” but I had an answer anyway:

Probably running a lot slower and not having nearly as much fun.

I was pounding my way through the streets of Newton, en route to Heartbreak Hill in my second Boston Marathon.

The screams of the spectators rang in my ears. Miles of outstretched hands reached across the metal barricades for high-fives. Often, I’d hear someone yell my number.

“Yeah 683! Let’s go 683!”

Every time I heard that, a goofy grin would crack across my face. Sometimes I’d throw up a fist pump, a salute or just my pinky and index finger raised for heavy metal rockitude. Whenever I slapped a high five, it felt like a power-up.

Carbs and oxygen might have kept my body going; the love from the crowd sustained my spirit.

You’re going to need it, boy — if you’re going to stay alive over Heartbreak.

Take the Wellesley Scream Tunnel just before the half-marathon mark. Students at this woman’s college maintain a venerable tradition of lining up to kiss passing runners. Forgetting the obvious incentive that I’m a single man, with no guarantees about the next time I’ll get a chance to kiss a woman outside a 26.2-mile race, I went in for a set of lips knowing it would it would help me run the next couple minutes without thinking about the burning on the soles of my feet, or the fatigue leaking drip, drip, drip into my system with every mile. I’ll take a little love over pain any day.

Love and pain, as anyone who studies this will tell you, go together as often as the rose goes with thorns.

The pain of last year’s bombings at the finish line was never far from our minds, yet the memory of those killed and injured had brought the crowds and the runners back in droves: 36,000 registered entrants this year, a million spectators lining the course according to reports. The racecourse parted a sea of humanity that thundered with whoops, applause and noisemakers. Spectators waved “Boston Strong” signs. The slogan appeared on banners and T-shirts in Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham — all the way to Copley.

Tighter security hadn’t checked the crowds’ enthusiasm, not for the kids giving high-fives, not the musicians along the course. As I walked down the street to the Hopkinton start, I noticed a couple of entrepreneurs offering samples to passing racers.

“Free beer!” they shouted! “Free donuts!” “Free cigarettes!” I didn’t see anyone go for the cigs, but some stole sips of beer.

The enthusiasm of spectators met with determination from runners.

I know some of the bombing survivors had returned this year to run or wheel the course. I saw several runners hammering out the miles in prosthetic blades, though I wasn’t sure which, if any of them, had been in the blasts.

Plenty of runners in my start corral already wore Boston Athletic Association tattoos. As the elite runners went by our corral to take their positions up front, we swarmed up against the barrier to give them high-fives. Then we got back in place waiting for the gun. We were back and we were here to kick some ass.

For my dad, the return to Boston meant the chance to cross the line after getting within a mile of the finish in 2013 before the explosions forced the remaining runners off the course. Last year was the 10^th time that he’d run this race, and he planned for it to be his last. The explosions on Boylston Street changed that view. He wasn’t about to end his Boston career without an official finish; and he wasn’t going to end it on a day darkened by mindless acts of violence.

Though Dad was further back on the route, I thought about him when burning pain cropped up on the bottom of my feet.

Think that’s bad eh? I thought. Count your blessings that you’re not running this race with a kidney stone.

Leave it to the old man to get a stone in his kidney and then decide he’s going to run a marathon anyway. When he’d announced his troubles the morning we left for Boston, I figured that he would stay home.

“Well, it’s going to take a while to get help for you if something goes wrong,” I told him, “Even if you’re just watching the race.”

Our neighbor, Bob, a retired doctor had another opinion: if he could handle it, he could go for it. A kidney stone might hurt like hell, but it wasn’t an immediate threat.

“I would have recommended against going to anyone not as stoic as your father,” Bob told me later.

Stoic. I was trying to be stoic, to keep everything in balance as I flew over the first ten miles in 59:30 — faster than I’d run a 10-mile race in Albuquerque a month ago. Only 16 miles left to go champ.

I couldn’t decide whether I was shooting myself in the foot by going out too fast (as many runners do in a race that starts on a downhill) or taking a worthwhile gamble that would give me a finish time worthy of my months of training. Though it felt like I was going a bit faster than I should, it is also true that not every day is the Boston Marathon, and that makes a difference. I decided not to decide on my pace, and just hold onto a comfortable cruising speed.

Comfortable cruising speed didn’t feel quite as comfortable at the 20-mile mark when I started up Heartbreak Hill. A sharp cramp pushed into my right side while my feet burned and chafed. I cursed myself for wearing cotton socks in old running flats. My breaths came in fast and shallow. I wondered if I was going to puke, if everything was going to fall apart right then.

My hand gravitated to the pain in my side and my steps started to slow.

The hand and the twisted expression must have told the crowd all it needed to know. A bunch of other spectators called out my number.

“You’re almost there man!” I heard.

Eventually, the nausea and my breathing stabilized. I picked up the pace another notch. It was no heroic effort. If I hadn’t worried about falling apart, I might have tried going a bit harder. All I wanted now was to maintain.

At the final turn onto Boylston Street I looked down a corridor of screaming fans to the finish line where those all-important numerals ticked down across an LCD screen. I felt my feet go over the timing mats and threw up my hands.

The wave I’d been riding since the start line crashed there with its all its tension and anticipation.

I hugged another runner right there and grabbed a bunch of hands. We were giddy, drunk really. I was happy for all of them and them for me. We were bonded because we’d broken ourselves and wound up here. We’d thrown huge chunks of our lives into training, and finished with times that we wanted, at least the time that I wanted: 2:38:19 chip time from start to finish and 269^th place.

We reeled down the street as volunteers handed out water and put medals over our heads. Someone pointed up at a white message board. Holy crap! Meb Keflezighi won? The guy’s almost 40! And an American to boot! It was first time an American   had won the race in 31 years. With a time of 2:08, the guy from San Diego had scored a blow for Boston. 

Later, I heard how he had written the names of the victims who died in the bombings and subsequent shootout on the four corners of his race bib. Even as I staggered around the finish area, I felt damn proud and happy as hell.

This was healing. It was breaking ourselves down, mind and spirit so we could grow back stronger.

The family meeting area was several city blocks away from the finish. We had barricades on either side with instructions to keep moving. Lightheaded and exhausted as I was, I didn’t feel like moving anywhere. I resisted the temptation to just crash into a wheelchair. Finally, I made it to where I needed to be and eased myself to the curb.

I spent 15 minutes doing nothing until my friends came in. Once again, I was feeling the love. I was stoked to see the guys who I’d busted my guts with running cross-country and track in college — not to mention our victorious racing days as the North American Distance Squad.

“Dude, are you still wearing those racing flats from the NADS?”

“He’s Tom. And he would be wearing mismatched socks on race day.”

I got a hand up off the curb, and would have fallen right back down on the sidewalk if another buddy hadn’t caught me.

Another NADS runner was crossing the finish line, so we met him up at the Boston Commons. It had been more than a year since I’d seen most of the guys; for some it had been even longer.

Before and after the race, I ran into several people I’d known from Connecticut, Wyoming and New Mexico. Sometimes, I felt less like I was at a competition, than at a big reunion.

The one guy I hadn’t seen since this morning was my dad.

I worked my way back to the meeting area to see him coming in. I saw our friend Phil, who we had driven up with the day before. My dad was a bit further back, but eventually I got him on the phone.

He’d gone the distance and was waiting for us back at the Commons.

The two of us at the finish with the medals around our necks made a nice addition to the years and miles that we’d run together. It’s basically his fault that I’ve been a runner most of my life and that I’ve been to Boston. Now that I’ve done the marathon twice it is no mystery to me why this race has had a hold on him.

My Dad, Phil and I went back to the car soon after we regrouped. As we left town, we basked in the stories of how smoothly the marathon had gone, how it had brought catharsis to the town after last year’s pain. I felt privileged that my footsteps had joined so many others on the run for Boylston Street.

As our aching bodies recuperate from the hard miles, we will carry the excitement from this day with us and the love from Boston. The feeling of a million voices ringing in our ears while our hearts thudded wild in our chests reminds us that our nature demands this competition from us, that even as we compete, we still run together on one course, as one pack, it reminds us that we run together through our hardships until we reach the line at last.