Race Report: Boston 2012 (The Inferno)

Tom Davis

Last Updated: April 25, 2012

Pre-Race

Because Boston is so popular, the organizers have just changed the rules and the times required to qualify were reduced (in other words, made more difficult) for each age group by 5 minutes and 59 seconds starting in 2013. (In the past, seconds were rounded down but from now on, missing your time by even 1 second will not be good enough.) I had barely qualified (but on a difficult marathon: the Big Sur International Marathon which is quite hilly) so I figured that just re-qualifying for Boston at Boston was a pretty good goal.

Starting about a week before the race, the long-range weather predictions were pretty pessimistic, calling for a possible high temperature of 80 degrees (and, since it's Boston, probably a fair amount of humidity). But it is Boston, and the weather can change suddenly and drastically, so I wasn't completely freaked out. I had run a difficult (for me) race in Boston in 1993 in high humidity and 72-degree temperatures, so if the prediction were true, at 80 degrees it would be pretty bad. I am not able to tolerate heat well and most of my biggest athletic catastrophes in the past have occurred in high-temperature conditions. I get dehydrated, can't keep up with the fluids and (probably partly as a result of the dehydration) I sometimes get massive muscle cramps in my legs.

In 2012 the race was on Monday, April 16, which is a holiday in Boston: "Patriot's Day" which celebrates Paul Revere's ride where, according to Sarah Palin (a woman considered by many citizens to be a "reasonable" choice for vice president (and hence, possibly president) of the US, God help us), Paul Revere was warning the British not to take away our guns, but according to historians, he was warning the Americans that the British troops were moving against them. My wife Ellyn and I flew to Boston, arriving Friday in the early evening so we had two full days to get ready. For dinner on Friday we ate at "Legal Seafood" and I feasted on my first soft-shelled crabs of the year.

On Saturday we went to the race expo to pick up the bib number and spend a fortune on race souvenirs. Then in the afternoon we met a friend who is in our Burning Man camp who took us to the Mt. Auburn Cemetery which is apparently one of the best places in the city to look for birds. We weren't there at a particularly good time (we arrived at about 3:30 pm) and we didn't see anything spectacular, but did see a lot of species, including those common east-coast birds that do seem "spectacular" to us folks from the west coast like the Northern Cardinal and the Eastern Blue Jay. We also saw a beautiful Wild Turkey. We did find a mausoleum with my name on it, so I figured that would be a good place for my eternal rest if I died on the course. See the image on the left, and click on it for a larger version.

That was the only real birding we did in Boston. During the race itself I wasn't in much of a condition to check out the avian wildlife, but we did see a bunch of Wild Turkeys on the bus ride to the start, and during the race it was impossible not to notice one Red-tailed Hawk and another large hawk that I couldn't identify, since it was probably one that's not common on the west coast. Or maybe I was just hallucinating.

After the birding we went to our friend's house and had a great dinner. His "house" was amazing: he's the caretaker for a boathouse on the Charles river and lives above the boat storage unit. We sat on the deck, looking over what must be one of the best views in Boston. He's been living there for many years. I had never seen racing rowboats up close, and they are pretty amazing. The two-person versions were made mostly of carbon fiber and weigh only about 30 pounds each. And they cost about $30,000 each. With a few million dollars worth of boats in one place, it was clear why it was worthwhile to have a caretaker for them.

Our Burning Man camp (called "Nosefish," for somewhat bizarre reasons) includes four people on the east coast, and all of them happened to be in Boston for this pre-race meal. We saw artwork in progress for our 2012 camp and discussed upcoming plans. We took photos of "Nosefish East" and posted them on the web for the amazement and amusement of rest of our camp.

By the time we arrived in Boston, the weather predictions were even more pessimistic, predicting possibly 87 degrees. It was at about that time that I decided that my goal of finishing with a time to re-qualify for Boston was probably gone, and that my run would probably just be a survival exercise. I do not do well in hot temperatures, and in the past in hot races I have had terrible problems with massive leg cramps. I did try something different this year: a friend who is an endocrinologist suggested that doses of vitamin D might help, so beginning about a week before the race I took two 2000-IU capsules of vitamin D every day, including a pair on race morning.

One screw-up that we discovered upon arriving in Boston is that I'd forgotten to pack any electrolyte tablets (I usually use Salt-Stick capsules) that I'd planned to carry with me in case the heat was bad and I lost a lot to sweat. I figured that there would be no problem finding them at the race expo, but that wasn't the case. The only thing we found were some little packets of electrolytes made by Gatorade that you were supposed to dissolve in 20 ounces of regular Gatorade. The little cups you get on the race course are much less than 20 ounces, but I figured that if worse came to worst, I could probably choke down a very salty mixture so I purchased four packets. The Gatorade folks told us about a "marathon running store" that was near our hotel and we could check that out, too.

There were no electrolyte capsules at the running store either, so I figured I'd just have to depend on the Gatorade packets.

We did almost nothing on Sunday: we had a leisurely brunch with a couple of friends from home, one of whom was going to race. We also took about a half hour to search for, and finally find, our first Geocache in Massachusetts: a magnetic micro cache hidden in Trinity Church. There were lots of muggles around (the term "muggles" generally refers to non-geocachers but in this case it basically meant church employees), but nobody seemed to care that we were looking in every nook and cranny and feeling up the railings overlooking a courtyard garden.

As the day went on, the predictions for the temperature went up, and 89 degrees was predicted. During the final two days, we got three emails from the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) begging us not to run if we weren't experienced and warning even the most experienced runners to take it easy because the conditions would almost certainly be brutal. Finally they offered anyone the opportunity to defer race entry until next year if they simply picked up their race packet but did not cross the starting line. I think the idea of doing that must have passed through many people's heads. It certainly did through mine.

Here at the bottom of this page are copies of the messages sent to us over the last few days by the BAA.

Often, in the days before a big race, I start feeling weird twinges in my legs and knees, and I'm always worried that, in spite of the fact that there were no injuries during training, that something was about to go wrong. This time there were no twinges, but when I put my foot in my shoe the day before the race, things just felt weird. I walked around a little, but the weirdness continued, and I finally took my shoe off to check. It turned out that we had purchased a dozen tiny muffins for breakfasts and one of them had rolled off the table and into my shoe. My foot had squished it into a paste that filled the toe, so that was a relief!

The night before the race, we had dinner in a nice (but fairly expensive) Italian restaurant (called Sorellina) that was right across the street from our hotel. I got to sleep early, and slept pretty well, which is unusual for me before a race.

Race Day

When I arrived at the Boston Commons, it looked like total chaos at the bus stop with thousands of people trying to board, but it turned out things were under control, and we did board in an efficient and fair order and, as usual, I had an interesting seat-mate for the long ride to Hopkinton. The funniest thing that occurred was that on the bus there was a radio station playing in the background and just as the bus took the Hopkinton exit, the radio announcer said something like, "It's going to be a hot one. We may be in for record high temperatures today." At that point, one of the runners shouted, "Sweeeeet!!!" Many runners I know -- at least the long-distance ones -- have a pretty black sense of humor, and I really wished that I had been the one to shout it.

As it was in the past (I'd run twice in Boston before), everything in the athletes' village was well-organized: there was a table with free sun block, so I put on a preliminary coat there, then tables with Gatorade, water, bagels, bananas, et cetera. There was even a table dispensing free Gatorade pre-race fluid that we were supposed to drink 10 or 15 minutes before taking off. I figured I'd give it a try, since although I'd never used it before, the label on the package indicated that it was a pretty reasonable mixture. I think there must have been coffee available, but I didn't find it, and I usually have coffee in the mornings, although I had skipped it in the hotel room. I did have a PowerGel packet with "2x" the caffeine, so I figured I could eat that to avoid caffeine withdrawal.

I sat under one of the huge tents set up at the school and talked with the folks nearby while we waited for the start. The race start was broken into three waves, the first beginning at 10:00 and mine at 10:40. The temperature wasn't bad and I ate a banana and a few bites of another bagel about an hour before I was to start and also carefully put on sun block from the tube I'd brought with me.

The most interesting story I heard was from somebody who, after a recent Boston Marathon, found an offer on eBay to sell finisher's medals. Apparently the seller was stupid enough to say that he'd obtained them in the medical tent at the end of the race where he stole them from finishers who were too far out of it to notice. According to the guy who told me this, the culprit was arrested.

In another big coincidence, a couple of gals sat down next to me, and of course we asked where we all came from. They said "northern California," so of course I asked for details and they said "Palo Alto." I told them I was from Los Altos Hills, and they said that they were really from Los Altos, but they always tell folks Palo Alto since that's so much better known. So out of the 27,000 runners, three people who lived within a mile or two of each other happened to pick the same spot to sit down and avoid the sun.

A half hour before the start I decided to make one final pass through the bathroom lines to empty out the last of everything, and as soon as I stepped out from under the tent into the sun, it felt like stepping into an oven. Not good! Just before I left for the race start I drank the Gatorade pre-race packet: perhaps 3 or 4 ounces of liquid with a fair amount of sugar in it.

It's about 3/4 of a mile from the athletes' village to the race start and the announcer told us when to start moving toward the starting line, depending on our start time and corral number. That 3/4 of a mile was a long walk, mostly in the sun (there was an additional problem in that with a race early in the year, none of the trees have leaves yet, so there wasn't much shade). Near the starting line, they'd set up another huge set of porta-potties, which was great, since I suddenly needed to do something that couldn't be done on the course by stepping behind a tree and there were plenty of free toilets. When I finally got to the starting corral, I had worked up a pretty good sweat and I got there almost as soon as the starting gun went off.

I think it was at about this point that I stopped caring at all about my time: I just wanted to finish before the course closed. The heat was already bothering me and I knew it would just get hotter. I also knew there wasn't a prayer in Hell of re-qualifying and that if I pushed hard I'd almost certainly wind up with massive cramps or maybe with an ambulance ride and I just didn't see the point in doing that for what would in any case be a very bad final time. Best case, I figured, would be to average about 12-minute miles, and I needed to run sub-9 to re-qualify, so I knew I'd miss by more than an hour.

Getting a late start doesn't matter, since everyone wears an RFID chip that records the time that you cross various receptors on the course. In the case of Boston, that's the start, finish, midpoint, and every 5-kilometer step. I think I got to the official starting line about a minute after the gun went off and I started my timer at that point.

The BAA really did a good job of preparing for the heat as well as it could, and perhaps 10 yards beyond the starting line was the first aid station. This was the first time in my life that I used an aid station at the start, and I stopped after ten yards to drink a large cup of water.

"Running" the Race

I'm sure almost everyone was using way more water than usual, and bless the BAA for not running out at any of the stations as has happened in a few recent major marathons. I was in the last wave of runners to start putting me behind most of the racers so by the time I got to each aid station the ground was totally littered with used paper cups. Since I'm sure almost all the runners did what I did; namely, pour a cup of water over their heads at most stations, the ground at each aid station was also soaking wet. The mixture of thousands of cups, gallons of water and thousands of footsteps churned the cup/water mixture into something resembling papier mâché. The next day, when my shoes dried out, Ellyn couldn't figure out what the small weird pieces of gray/white "cardboard" were doing on my shoes. There's a photo on the right; click on it for a larger version.

Up until about mile 10 I stuck to my original plan, to run except through the aid stations, but at about mile 10 I decided that I'd also take a 30-second walk every 10 minutes, and that worked for another 40 minutes. I do remember how depressing it was passing the 10k mark and thinking that I was less than 1/4 done and already feeling pretty bad. I started to slow down, and the only real high point was at Wellesley College where the girls have an amazing cheering section that probably kept everybody running well for the length of the campus, but I noticed that I, like almost everyone else, started walking as soon as we were past.

By the time I finally got to mile 15 or 16 I noticed that on almost any slight uphill, as far as I could see, all the "runners" were walking, and, except for near the finish line, I could always see a fair percentage of walkers. I kept passing and re-passing the same people, most of whom had a similar bib number to mine, indicating that their qualifying marathon time was about the same as mine.

I did seem to be doing OK relative to cramps, and only one time, at about mile 18, did both of my hamstrings tell me that they were about to cramp. After I walked for a few hundred yards, the threat seemed to go away.

From mile 1 to mile 16 my average heart rate slowly increased (from about 125 to 135) as my pace slowly decreased (from 9:21 to 13:31). As slow as a 13:31 pace is, I slowed down significantly after that.

Between miles 20 and 24 I walked a lot, every now and then jogging a bit, and finally at about mile 24 I could see the "Citgo" sign in the distance which marks the point where you're one mile from the finish. I jogged a bit more of mile 24 to 25 and decided to run the last mile, but that didn't last long, but finally, when I turned onto Boylston Street and could see the finish in the distance, I did jog in.

As expected, along the course, and especially toward the end, there were lots and lots of ambulances to pick up downed runners. I saw plenty of them and I'm sure there were plenty more. I was certain I didn't want that to happen to me. In fact, when I had finished and was back in the hotel room we heard ambulance after ambulance after ambulance.

In addition to the official aid stations, I often made use of the unofficial ones, run by people who lived along the route. Some handed out water, some ice, and some slices of oranges or bananas. I took most of the orange slices and some water and quite a few handfuls of ice. I tried putting the ice in my cap, but that was pretty uncomfortable, so I just kept it in my mouth or in my hands. (I had used the ice-in-the-hat strategy at Ironman Canada the year before and it worked well, but for some reason, it was uncomfortable in Boston.)

On the left is a photo of me near the finish. Click on it for a larger version.

Since there wasn't much shade from the trees, the runners made use of almost every available shady opportunity. The sun was pretty high in the sky and that made shade even harder to come by, but if there was a tall enough building, there were sometimes a few feet of shade on the right side of the road. When this occurred, almost the entire river of runners would squeeze to the right for as long as the building extended.

In the early parts of the race, say, up until about mile 20, every time a spectator was spraying water from a hose I was sure to soak myself. But somehow, after about mile 20, I didn't feel like it at all, and I tried to avoid the sprinklers. In spite of all the stuff I was drinking, I wasn't sure I was keeping up, and sometimes my jersey seemed too dry, as if I wasn't sweating, and this seemed doubly weird since I splashed myself with water at almost every opportunity.

Just before the race, and at about miles 10 and 17, I mixed packets of the Gatorade electrolytes with the cups of Gatorade at the aid stations and choked them down. The first two went down fine, although it tasted very salty since I was mixing the stuff with 2 or 3 ounces of fluid instead of 20, but after the last one I started feeling a bit nauseated just after I got it down. The nausea went away after about a mile, but I decided not to try using the fourth packet I had. I did eat the caffeinated gel at about mile 8 and another (non-caffeinated) at mile 16 provided by the race organizers.

Post Race

Ellyn did see me finish and I saw her about 200 yards from the line so I figured she'd be at "S" before I was since I had to walk about 6 blocks in a sort of loop to get to the meet-up areas, but when I arrived she wasn't there. I paced back and forth for a while, wondering when/if I should go to the "D" area in case there had been a miscommunication. I decided to stay at "S" so that Ellyn would have to do the walking, and after a few minutes she showed up. Apparently a spectator had passed out between her and me and the road had been blocked for the paramedics.

We walked the two or three blocks back to the hotel without incident, and got in the elevator for our room on the 21st floor. Just standing still for the first time in the elevator, my head started to get really light and I couldn't tell what was going on. Luckily, before I passed out, we got to our floor and I was able to sit down and the feeling went away after a couple of minutes. My legs were starting to feel a bit crampy, so I took a hot bath (which had helped in the past) and that feeling went away. Then I took a nap and seemed almost normal after an hour or so (well, "normal" except that I had a very funny gait). Apparently I wasn't the only one to feel light-headed. While waiting in line at a restaurant for dinner, we witnessed another marathon finisher pass out but he seemed to recover after just a couple of minutes. We talked to others who also had seen people passing out after the race.

This was one of the hardest races ever for me to finish, including the three Ironmans I've done. I followed a great training schedule, missed almost none of the workouts, but did almost no training in the heat since I tend to run early in the mornings.

In fact, waiting in the airport for our flight home we met a woman who had done the race (we racers were usually easy to spot: most of us wore some indication of the race, from participant t-shirt to finisher's medal). She said that she'd done surprisingly well in the heat, but, because of an injury, hadn't done her usual training, but had taken lots of classes in Bikram yoga where the yoga is done in very high-temperature rooms. I had done almost no training in the heat, and I have read that there are things called "heat-shock proteins" that can aid in performance in high-temperature conditions, but you need to train in high temperatures to activate them. Maybe the yoga did it for her, and maybe I should have taken some classes in Bikram myself.

Results

Final race-day temperature: 89 degrees according to the New York Times. Number of runners who took the deferment until next year: 427. More than 2100 runners were treated for dehydration and/or exhaustion.

My (horrible) splits:

5k: 0:30:41
10k: 1:05:02
15k: 1:39:22
20k: 2:17:58
half: 2:25:22
25k: 2:55:23
30k: 3:38:29
35k: 4:29:34
40k: 5:20:55
finish: 5:38:11

Here's the GPS trace, heart-rate, et cetera for the race.

Emails from the BAA