Boston Sadness

In my mother tongue, there is a saying which has an equivalent in several languages. It roughly translates to, 'Who will protect the field if the fence grazes on it?" Essentially, who guards the guards, etc.

The title of this post is a reference to that long pending dream of mine to line up at the starting line in Hopkinton Square.

From my discussions with the BAA, it appears that the dream will have to wait for a while.

I had spent the last few weeks agonizing over my chances of getting a place to run in Boston in Apr 2012 given the new norms. Among various nutcase activities I had compiled the no. of people across my age category (18-34) for the top 10 marathons in the US to see how many would beat me. Now all that is irrelevant :(

I had known that the new norms favoured faster runners. I had not tried to explore the ambiguous territory of whether "fast" was an age-adjusted term. Apparently it is. And that breaks my heart. I had kept away from checking that out till today hoping to leave it for later, when I would find out in Sep anyways. In one reckless moment I wrote a mail to the BAA to clarify this and they did quite generously and clearly.

Running is the one activity that guards me from getting down due to various other causes. However that leaves me open to the risk of being vulnerable to something that saddens me and has its origins in running. Not getting a place in Boston 2012 despite making the 3:10 norm is a terrible pill to swallow.

This means that I will need to beat the 3:05 norm next year and by a large margin to ensure I am through. While that is infinite motivation to run faster in the future (I have been suffering from marginal complacency & some hubris in the past 5 weeks, since I got back from the US), it means that I will need to exceed my own performance by an order of magnitude.

Humility is never late in arriving

Of course, I will still apply in Sep 2011, but my calculations show that there is no chance of my qualifying since older folks will be able to beat their norm by a larger margin than my piddly 13 seconds