Watching the 2024 Boston Marathon was hard for me.

After running the race in 2021 and 2022, I wanted to run the race at least one more time and I didn’t do anything that year to make it happen.

(I will stop here and note how incredibly lucky I was to run the Boston Marathon twice and I am very fortunate to even have a chance to run it again and I know that. But boy do I want to run it one more time.)

2023 was fine. Even I had no expectation to run the race three years in a row.

But 2024 was hard.

And that was the beginning of a plan to at least give myself a chance to run it again.

I decided to spend this year ensuring I did enough to qualify for the running club’s bib lottery.

Now, there have been two results of this - one being that I am eligible for the lottery, which takes place tonight. The other is, like in any good fairy tale, I have found joy in the journey and have enjoyed everything I’ve done over the past year so whether or not I get picked at least I got a lot out of the process.

But boy do I hope I get picked.

Here’s the deal - the running club was given 6 bibs. 11 people are in the lottery.

Obviously, the odds are pretty good.

But also, there’s just as much a chance that my name isn’t picked as there is it is picked.

And I am honestly OK with either result.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I am very happy that by the end of the night I’ll have resolution one way or the other.

And since this was one of the big 2025 goals, I figured it was worth spending a little bit of time talking about.

If I Do Get Picked

Obviously this is the easy category. It’s the friggin’ Boston Marathon. So if I get picked I’ll be psyched just for that reason alone.
There’s also the fact that I loved that second Boston I ran so much and I want to recapture that feeling while hopefully running a more strategic race. I am a smarter runner now than the two times I ran Boston, and I’d like to use those smarts on this course one more time.
There’s also the fact that I have kind of dreamed upon different ways to train and spending more time attacking the different parts of the course in training. It’s a real home-course advantage I have, and I want to take more advantage of that better this time.

If I Don’t Get Picked

But listen, if it doesn’t happen it’s certainly not the end of the world. One of the things I enjoyed so much about 2025 was volunteering at the Boston Marathon and experiencing it that way. So if I don't hit the lottery Sunday, I’ll know by Monday night whether I can volunteer again with the running club, and that is not a bad way to spend Marathon Monday - it certainly felt better than how I felt two years ago.
I have the NYC Half and the opportunity to build a different kind of race calendar this year if I don’t run Boston, so that’s nice. I can also do everything I did last year all over again to qualify for the 2027 lottery…but I’ll likely be doing a lot of that again whichever way this goes.
And I keep thinking about this: It’s just such a time commitment to train for the marathon. I mean, I have to train for the NYC Half anyway, so I’ll be getting out there, but it seems like a chore right now with all the darkness and cold and weather. I know it will happen if I get in…but there’s slightly less pressure to do it if I don’t.

So obviously I’ll let you know here what the story is. It might not be tomorrow - I might need some hours to process it and I don’t want to turn something around that quickly later tonight.

But there’s a good chance I’ll have a post about it on Tuesday.

Here’s hoping.