There are several ways to win a marathon. One is to be cautious: run with the race favorites, bide your time, and then make a move in the final third. That’s how Rita Jeptoo won the woman’s race in the Boston Marathon Monday morning. She set a course record, and she did so with fantastic style, pulling away with a couple of miles to go, and accelerating as the four women she was running with disappeared like birds off the horizon.
There’s another way to win, which is to pull away early and try to hold on. But this is a strategy for failure. Running by yourself is draining, physically and emotionally. You get hit by more wind. Your mind wanders. You start to ache, and it’s hard to pace yourself. And then the chase pack, like a lion running down a wounded gazelle, catches you.
That’s the strategy Mebrahtom Keflezighi chose for this race. He took off from the pack with one other runner and had an eight second lead eight miles in. Then he broke off by himself, and the lead just kept growing. A group of runners—generally considered the greatest field ever assembled in Boston, for the first anniversary of the marathon bombings—stayed in a tight pack, pacing themselves, while Meb, as he’s universally known, surged onward. Meb has had an illustrious career: he has won the New York City Marathon and an Olympic silver medal. He may be the greatest American marathoner ever. But he is old—thirty-eight—and fourteen men in the field had run faster marathons. His early move seemed insane. Age is supposed to make you wily, not reckless.
By the eighteen-mile mark, Meb was leading all the favorites by more than a minute, but it seemed unlikely that he could hold on. Boston’s infamous hills were approaching. He started to look tired. But he persevered: up and then down. With just a couple of miles to go, Meb looked over his shoulder once, and then twice. He could surely see the approaching orange jersey of Wilson Chebet, a Kenyan a decade younger, and with a career marathon best four minutes faster.
It briefly looked like the inevitable would happen. Meb slowed. He looked down. His head seemed to drag so low that it looked like he might bow down to his socks, which were pulled absurdly high. As they passed the Citgo sign, his lead was down to eight seconds. This is an emotional part of the race: it’s where you pass Fenway Park, and where the crowd’s cheers can distract you from your pain. It’s also near the point where many runners were stopped and turned around last year. This year, it was where Meb accelerated again. Then Chebet seemed to slow. Suddenly, it looked like Meb could really win.
No American man has won this race, the iconic American marathon, since 1983. As a child in Boston, I remember that race. And I remember, in the following years, cheering the many, many Africans who kept winning and winning and winning. It was four years afterwards, in 1987, that Keflezighi, then twelve years old, fled the land of his birth, Eritrea, and immigrated to this country. Last year, he was near the finish line when the bombs went off. The sounds, he said, reminded him of his childhood.
Before the race started, I thought that there could be no greater tribute to the city and to the country than a victory by Meb, an immigrant who came to America because of the opportunities and the safety it offered. He wasn’t born here; he and his family chose to come here.
Meb finished in two hours, eight minutes, and thirty-seven seconds—ahead by eleven seconds. He raised his hands to the sky and let out a cry of joy. He was standing in the same place we saw in so many horrible photographs last year. He had run faster than he’d ever run before.
The bombing had been on his mind. “I visualize the race every day since it happened,” he said after he’d won. “It's not just about me. But for the United States.”
Photograph by Charles Krupa/AP.
