The Best Boston Marathon Stories Through the Years From Runner’s World

By Sarah Lorge Butler and Erin Strout

When the skies opened up over Boston early on April 16, 2018, it was almost too perfect.

A nation of running fans was pulling for a 33-year drought to end—for an American woman to win the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1985. On the starting line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, at least three U.S. athletes had the credentials to contend, creating a powerful wave of hope not seen in decades, if ever.

A deluge of icy rain drenching the 26.2-mile route to Copley Square, the relentless 25-mph headwinds, and the temperatures hovering in the high 30s had already made the 122nd running of the prestigious road race historic. It was clear that 2018’s Boston had a late entrant to field: Mother Nature.

Desiree Linden was not intimidated by this vicious opponent. The two-time Olympian, a Southern California transplant to the suburbs of Detroit, had spent her entire career preparing for a day like this, training for 12 years in the often challenging conditions of the Midwest with the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project.

What unfolded during the next two hours, 39 minutes, and 54 seconds wasn’t what Linden—or anyone else—expected. On her sixth try, haunted by the memory of losing this race by two seconds in 2011, the 34-year-old woman ran with doubt, in fear, and ultimately with unbreakable resolve down Boylston Street to become the 2018 Boston Marathon champion.

This is an account of exactly how it happened, through the observations and experiences of Linden’s competitors, coach, family, race volunteers and officials, and Linden herself.

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By Roger Robinson

Meb Keflezighi gave Boston and America the victory the whole country longed for, but scarcely dared hope for, in the most emotional and significant of all 118 Boston Marathons. He did it with a courage and determination that the whole nation can be proud of. If Boston and America were to find healing from last year's horrific finish-line attack, there could be no better resolution than by an American winning this Boston Marathon (in 2:08:37), and in such a way. Boston today was a field of dreams.

Stride by stride, in one of the most astonishing races in the Boston Marathon's long history, we could hardly believe what we were seeing. Through the early miles, it was Americans doing the work, with Keflezighi, Ryan Hall, and Josphat Boit up front, tagged by one of the most fearsome fields of sub-2:05 men ever assembled. They're kidding, we thought.

In the middle stages, Keflezighi kept it going on steady 2:08 schedule, accompanied by fellow-American Boit (Kenya-born, now from Mammoth Lakes), out on their own, while the big pack drifted 20, then 40 seconds behind. They've got to be kidding, we thought. They must be watching each other, disregarding the impetuous light-weights from USA, biding time to start the real race and gobble them up.

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By Steve Friedman

Two weeks before most of her right leg was blown off, Roseann Sdoia turned 45. She was feeling sorry for herself.

She owned a house in Quincy, on the South Shore, and was renting a second floor apartment in a favorite Boston neighborhood. She had close friends, loving family. She liked her job, vice president at a real estate firm.

“I’ve had a good life,” she says. “I’ve traveled. I’ve been to Europe many times. Summer I’d go to Nantucket, to Newport. I had lived in Florida, lived in California.”

Nonetheless, she couldn’t shake a feeling of self-pity. “It was the worst day ever,” she says “I was pretty down in the dumps about it.”

“No cake,” she told anyone who might have bought or made one. “No singing.”

She did what she often did. She ran. She used to run three, four times a week. “Running kept me sane,” she says. “Running was my time to calm down, to think things through.” In the spring and summer, she would run at the gym in the morning, three or four miles, nothing crazy, just enough to stay in shape. On a Saturday or Sunday, she would run along the Charles River, and before the bombings she was up to five miles. Just the day before the marathon, she had run the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) 5K and finished it in 29:49.

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By Amby Burfoot

No marathoner has ever been less well prepared than Roberta Gibb—not even Pheidippides, is my guess. After rising early on April 19, 1966, Gibb, then 23, had no clue what to eat, how to dress, or how she would get from her parents’ home in Winchester, Massachusetts, to the Boston Marathon starting line in Hopkinton.

After eating “something light” (she can’t remember what), she scrounged through the laundry room to find a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt and a pair of her brother’s Bermuda shorts. She pulled these over her normal running gear—a black one-piece bathing suit. The shorts drifted south, so she cinched them around her waist with a length of—no kidding—twine.

[tragedy of 2013]

When her father stormed from the house declaring her “delusional,” Gibb had to cajole her only slightly less dubious mother into a ride to Hopkinton. It was about 90 minutes before the noontime start when she was dropped off on the outskirts of town. Gibb, then living in San Diego, had never been to Hopkinton, had never run a track meet or road race, and had no idea what to expect.

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By John Brant

In front of some audiences, Dick Beardsley never even mentions the 1982 Boston Marathon. In fact, he barely touches upon his running career at all. When he’s delivering one of his regular talks to a 12-step group, for instance, he simply begins, “Hi, I’m Dick, and I’m a drug addict,” then launches into the rending story of his disease and recovery.

When Beardsley finishes speaking, and the people are wiping away their tears and settling back into their seats after a standing ovation, then the host might explain how Dick Beardsley is the fourth-fastest American marathoner of all time, and that his race with Alberto Salazar at Boston 22 years ago remains one of the signature moments in the history of distance running; perhaps, in the history of any sport. But other audiences, such as this one at the Royal Victoria Marathon in Victoria, British Columbia, know all about Beardsley’s athletic career, and are eager-even hungry-to relive his legendary “duel in the sun” with Salazar.

There’s a considerable amount of preamble first. Beardsley is not good at leaving things out. He tells the crowd of 200 about getting creamed at his first high school football practice, quitting the team, and turning out for cross-country without knowing quite what it was. “Do they tackle you in cross-country?” he asked a friend. He explains how he ran his second marathon in a brand-new pair of running shoes that he didn’t want to get dirty by breaking in, and that he prepared by fasting for four days because he’d read somewhere that fasting worked in ultramarathons, so he figured…

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By Brian Dalek

The “logical” goal, according to two-time Boston Marathon champion Joan Benoit Samuelson, was to run within 40 minutes of her winning time 40 years ago at Boston, which was 2:35:15.

But Joanie, the 1984 Olympic marathon medalist who has inspired millions of runners over the past four decades, rarely settles for just reaching the logical goal.

On Marathon Monday, while wearing a similar Bowdoin College singlet to honor her win in 1979 when she was 21 years old, the 61-year-old finished the race well under her goal time, clocking an even 3:04.

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By John Brant

Rick Hoyt lies awake but unmoving, watching clear winter sunlight spill into his bedroom. He often spends whole days watching light move across a room, or along the course of a road race—the pale April sunshine filtering through the bare trees along Route 135 in the early miles of the Boston Marathon, for instance, or the tropical sun lancing the clouds that shroud Mauna Loa volcano at the Hawaii Ironman.

He lies on his belly, his head turned to the right, alone in the apartment, in exactly the position that Naomi, his personal care attendant, left him at 10 o’clock the night before. You would think that Rick’s nights would seem endless, but the medication he takes to relax his chronically clenched muscles allows him to sleep soundly for 12 hours at a stretch. Unable to voluntarily move any part of his body but his head, and that just barely, Rick lies calmly, studying the morning light. By its slant and texture he reckons the time to be around 10.

The sunlight keeps filling the bedroom, like April in January. It must be warm out on the streets. The women would have shed their heavy coats. From the vantage point of his wheelchair, Rick regards women from an arresting, navel-level angle. His two brothers give him a hard time about that. They call it a perk of cerebral palsy.

He hears the key in the lock, and then a step in the hallway. Then, “Good morning, Rick.”

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By Kathrine Switzer

On a dark, six-mile run in a wild snowstorm in mid-December 1966, I had a terrible argument with my otherwise kindly old coach, Arnie Briggs. It was in Syracuse, New York, where God first invented snow and never let up. I was a 19-year-old journalism student at Syracuse University, and since there was no women’s running team there or anywhere else for that matter, I began training unofficially with the men’s cross-country team.

[Running Revolutionary Kathrine Switzer’s Life Is Being Made Into a Movie]

That’s where I met 50-year-old Arnie, who had trained for years with the team. Arnie was actually the university mailman and a veteran of 15 Boston Marathons. He was excited to see a woman—the first—come out to run, and took slowpoke me under his training wing. To cajole me through tough evening sessions like this, Arnie told and retold stories of famous Bostons. I loved listening to them—until this night when I snapped and said, “Oh, let’s quit talking about the Boston Marathon and run the damn thing!”

“No woman can run the Boston Marathon,” Arnie fired back.

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By Amby Burfoot

Eighteen miles into the 1968 Boston Marathon, I looked up and didn’t see another runner on the road ahead. Not one. I had dreamed every night for years about winning Boston. And now I was almost there. I had just turned the corner at the Newton fire station and begun the run eastward on hilly, serpentine Commonwealth Avenue. Ahead, thick crowds edged onto the road—grandparents and their children and their children’s children—shading their eyes and peering at the colorful stream of runners, all 890 of us. Three motorcycle policemen led the moving spectacle, and a photo truck, and a yellow school bus containing the Boston press.

[An Icon Talks Fear]

For five years, I had set myself the singular goal of winning Boston. I ran up to 175 miles a week, entered every road race I could find, broke down on occasion, as all runners do, but then resurrected myself and trained even harder. Always with Boston as the focal point. If I could hold on, my name would go into the record book with the likes of Clarence DeMar, Les Pawson, Tarzan Brown, Gerard Cote, “Old John” A. Kelley, and my coach-mentor, “Young John” J. Kelley, the 1957 winner.

Only one thing stood between me and a Boston victory—the shadowy specter that was stalking me. I couldn’t hear him, only my own desperate breathing. Couldn’t see him, for he was a stride back. But when I glanced down at my feet, I saw two dark shapes—my own, tall and angular. And my pursuer’s—shorter, more compact, with arms that pumped more vigorously than mine.

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By Kit Fox

Glen Raines’s loincloth is surprisingly sturdy.

He sewed it himself, using tan-colored faux-fur fabric from a hobby store near his home in San Diego. It has an inner-pouch for support and is quite breathable, in part because it’s styled like a thong in the back. It’s fastened together by a small Velcro strip on the side that has yet to come undone, despite sweat or fluttering breezes or the outreached hands of overzealous marathon spectators.

Which is good. Because at the 2017 Boston Marathon, that tiny hand-sewn piece of fabric precariously secured around his deeply tanned frame was an essential part of a costume and running alter-ego Raines has created named, “Barefoot Caveman.”

Without it, he would simply be a naked man. So he carries a safety pin, just in case.

“Because what do you do if there is a wardrobe malfunction in the middle of the marathon?” Raines told Runner’s World the day after he finished in 3:40:43.

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By Hailey Middlebrook

You hear them before you see the signs. Around the halfway mark in the Boston Marathon, just seven miles before hitting the hills in Newton, runners pass by Wellesley College, where the all-female student body forms the course’s famous “Scream Tunnel.”

While the college students’ loud cheers—and high fives and smooches—give the stretch its name, it’s also known for its quieter encouragement: hundreds of handmade signs, all painted by the students by the request of runners and friends, hang on the police barricades.

[Race Signs That Will Bring a Smile to Your Face]

Cheering on the runners on Marathon Monday has been a tradition at Wellesley for decades.

“When you apply to Wellesley, they have you look at this webpage called the Wellesley 100, which is 100 things to do before you graduate,” Kate Dolph, class of 2021, told Runner’s World. “One of them is ‘Cheer on the sidelines at Marathon Monday.’ But you don’t really know what it is until you experience it yourself.”

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By Heather Mayer Irvine

The words “Boston Marathon” conjure up feelings and experiences that can’t quite be expressed with words for marathoners. The infamous course, which goes along the train tracks—making it easy for officials in 1896 to get to the finish before the runners—has a special place in the hearts of vets, newbies, BQ-to-bes, and spectators.

The quirky, point-to-point route consisting of fast downhills and soul-crushing inclines passes through eight cities and towns, starting in Hopkinton and ending on Boylston Street in Boston. For the first time ever, runners may witness changing leaves instead of budding blooms at this year’s race, which was rescheduled for Monday, September 14 due to coronavirus concerns.

[during a driving rainstorm in 2018, we have plenty of stories to scratch your marathon itch]

Whether you’re lining up for the race in 2020 for the first time or you have more Celebration Jackets than you can count, here’s how to tackle each part of the Boston course.

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