Bucket List of an Idiot

by Dom Harvey

  There were 3,290,000 pages about the event, detailing the rich history of the race. Reading about it gave me a feel for why it is so special—it is a field of like-minded people. No first-timers here, no time-wasters. These were all people who had proven that they were fast enough to run Boston. I wanted in!

  The qualifying times seemed challenging, but definitely not impossible. For a thirty-five to thirty-nine-year-old male, the qualifying time was a three-hour, fifteen-minute marathon or quicker. This is the way the qualifying system works: the older you get, the more generous the qualifying times are. If you’re eighty or older, your qualifying time is five hours, which would still be a test for a lot of much younger runners—Katie Holmes ran the New York Marathon in 2007 and it took her five and a half hours. Then again, she may have intentionally run slowly to get a good break from her then husband, Tom Cruise!

  The seed was planted. I signed up for the 2010 Christchurch Marathon and got training. The Christchurch run was held in June, only four months before a big earthquake struck. Many of the buildings in the central city where the run finishes are no longer standing. At the time, all I was thinking about was qualifying for Boston. With hindsight, I consider myself bloody lucky to have got to do this run through this beautiful old city before the earthquake changed it forever—along with the lives of the people who call it home.

  I scraped in by the skin of my teeth. My official time was 3.14.34 meaning I had beaten the Boston qualifying time with a slender twenty-six seconds to spare.

  Hoop number 1 jumped through. Now I just had to register. Entries opened at 9 am on 18 October, Boston time. That’s a painfully early 2 am New Zealand time, but nothing about the road to Boston is easy, so I set my alarm and sat in the dimly lit office in nothing more than my undies while I filled in the massive number of fields on the page. Honestly, it is probably easier to get a gun licence than to get a spot in the Boston Marathon. By 2.12 am I had typed in all the info they needed, the most important bits being my Christchurch qualifying time and my credit card details. I clicked enter and the irritating little hourglass came up on the screen. Then . . . nothing.

  I started again, typing out all the information the Boston Athletics Association required. Once again I clicked enter and once again that annoying little hourglass popped up.

  I assumed the page must have been overloaded, so I kept trying. I gave myself until 3 am before I was going to drag myself back to bed, the place I rightfully belonged at that hour, not to mention the only place I was dressed for! It got to 3 am and I still hadn’t got in. I went back to bed but was unable to sleep because I was too wired. I was furious, mad, sad, a whole range of emotions. It’s not until you can’t have something that you find out just how much you wanted it.

  Later in the morning, around eightish, I decided to give it just one more try. And this time it worked first pop. I was in! Moments later I got an email confirming my acceptance to the 2011 Boston Marathon. The next day The Boston Globe newspaper ran a story about how the 20,000 places were filled in a record-breaking eight hours and three minutes.

  I would be one of those lucky (or unlucky, depending on how much you hate running) 20,000. My race number—6320.

  Me and my support crew of one, my wife (who was more focused on supporting the local economy through her love of clothes shopping than supporting me), flew to Los Angeles, then got on another plane for the six-hour flight from the west coast of America right over to the east coast. Because it was a direct flight into Boston two days before the run, the plane was full of marathon-looking people—lots of passengers in tracksuits, many with their own bags of fruit for the flight. A lot of serious runners get super-anal in the build-up to a run, to the point where they don’t trust food that has been prepared by anyone else. I really wanted to have a good run in Boston but I certainly didn’t feel the need to fly with my own bag of apples and bananas—airline pretzels would do me just fine! One guy even did lunges down the length of the aisle every couple of hours, something which made many other passengers (myself included) snigger.

  As soon as you land in Boston you can feel the marathon fever. There are posters around the airport welcoming runners to the city. A Boston man, a complete stranger who was waiting at the baggage carousel with me, asked if I was in town for the run and wished me luck, saying he would be out watching. This man was one of the few non-runners on our flight. He had a build more suited to shot-put than running any distance.

  Because of the popularity of the run and the amount of visitors it attracts to the city, all the hotels make the most of the influx and hike their prices up accordingly. We had booked one of the cheapest places we could find online, an old hotel called the Lennox. As luck would have it, the Lennox is right next to the finish line, and from our room’s window we could see the last 100 metres of the run route. When you’re about to run a marathon, the proximity of the finish line to the hotel is fairly important, because after running your arse off for 42 kilometres the last thing you want to be doing is hobbling another couple of kilometres back to a hotel somewhere.

  The Boston Marathon is held on the same day every year. It is a holiday called Patriots’ Day and falls on the third Monday of April. It has to be on a holiday because every single yellow school bus available is required to transport the runners to the tiny town of Hopkinton, twenty-six miles away, where the run starts.

  The sight of maybe sixty or seventy of those big chunky yellow school buses all lined up got me a little excited. I’m not sure why—it’s just a stupid bus, after all. I suppose it’s because we see them on telly and in movies all the time and they don’t look anything like the buses we have back home. Still, pretty lame on my part. I should have edited the confession about the buses out before submitting this manuscript to the publishers.

  The bus trip from Boston to the start line seems to take forever and does nothing to calm the nerves—all it does is reinforce just how far you have to run to get back to Boston!

  The bus drops you off at the grounds of Hopkinton High School, which is transformed into an athletes’ village for the day.

  I arrived in the athletes’ village and waited. I waited for ages. As you can probably imagine, it is a logistical nightmare shuttling 20,000 people from the finish line out to the start line, so the race organisers get everybody there with plenty of time to spare. I was on the bus by 6.20 am and made it to the athletes’ village just after 7 am, even though the race didn’t start until 10.

  The morning of the run was bloody freezing. Just brutally cold. I’d checked the forecast the day before and knew it was going to be gnarly, so I dressed accordingly (gloves, beanie and a hooded sweatshirt). Even with all these layers on, I was still underdressed and unbelievably cold.

  I found a near-empty 44-gallon rubbish drum with one of those plastic bin liners in. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I hand-picked the half-a-dozen bits of rubbish out and used it as a sort of makeshift sleeping bag. Even that bag did little to stop my relentless shivering. It did, however, mean I could keep my hands warm by putting them down my pants without anyone else seeing I had my hands down my pants. Bonus!

  It was easy to spot those who had run Boston before—people had magazines and newspapers to help pass the hours. Others had actual sleeping bags.

  Eventually the sun came up, but because the athletes’ village was in the grounds of a high school there were two-storey buildings everywhere which did a fantastic job of blocking out the sun’s warmth. There was one sunny spot on the field, which was well used by me and thousands of other runners who had not anticipated it would be such a bloody miserable morning.

  Half an hour before the race was due to start, an announcement was made telling us to leave the athletes’ village and walk to the start line, which was about 600 metres away.

  I removed all the extra clothes I was wearing and dumped them on the footpath. This is what you do in the Boston Marathon—all the runners wear old clothes and leave them on the sidewalks in Hop
kinton. Then, after the run commences, all the clothes get scooped up and given to the homeless. If you ever happen to be in Boston and spot a homeless person in an Adidas tracksuit, this may explain why.

  The gun went off at 10 am and after shuffling along through the crowd for a bit I finally made it to the actual start line. Then enough space cleared to actually start running. I had made it. I was running the Boston Marathon. I had earned my place in this field, and being on this same strip of road with all these other like-minded people was the reward.

  Yes, it was a huge pain in the arse to make it here—the hundreds of hours spent training, the qualifying, the arduous process of entering online in the middle of the night, the thousands of dollars it cost to travel here, not to mention the Antarctic conditions I’d had to endure the past three hours. But all of that was forgotten as I heard the stampede sound that 20,000 human beings make when they’re all running at once.

  And I was part of a community—all these people in front of me and behind me had gone through the same things to be here today.

  Most of the 42-kilometre route is lined with spectators. This support is helpful; it makes you forget just how many kilometres you still have left to run before you finish. The most spectator noise comes from a town called Wellesley, which is just before the halfway point in the run. You hit the 20-kilometre mark and start to hear a high-pitched tone. A loud but distant squealing noise. It sounds like the noise a jet engine makes. This noise is made by the girls of Wellesley College and has been nicknamed ‘the scream tunnel’.

  Wellesley is a posh girls’ university with a roll of 2400. It has been a tradition for decades that the girls of Wellesley get on the roadside and scream for the runners while offering up hugs and kisses! No shit! And I’ll tell you what—the male runners appreciate this far more than any of the Gatorade stands!

  I saw these girls holding signs that said things like:

  ‘Kiss me, I’m half Asian’

  ‘Kiss me, I’m single’

  ‘Kiss me, I’m from Lithuania’

  ‘I majored in kissing’

  And even:

  ‘Kiss me, I’m a redhead’

  I suspect if this last girl really wanted to be kissed she would have dyed her hair a more socially acceptable colour.

  I did slow down to a jog to enjoy the atmosphere as I ran through the scream tunnel. It was two minutes of my life where I got to experience what it would be like to be a rock star with groupies. For that brief moment, I was Jon Bon Jovi in leather pants. I didn’t stop for any kisses, though. It would have been an act of cruelty to these poor young women. I had been running for an hour and thirty-eight minutes by that stage. I was sweaty, there was a Gatorade stain on my singlet, I had my own saliva on my face from when I spat and the wind caught it and blew it back at me and there was dry snot under my nose. It was very charitable of these young women to offer me their lip-service, but I could not be so mean.

  The Wellesley girls make up just part of the Boston support crew. An estimated half a million people hit the streets each year to support the runners. Many even go to the trouble of making signs to motivate the runners (or just give them a laugh). Out of the hundreds of signs I saw these are the best I recall seeing on the 42-kilometre course:

  You’re halfway there. Woo hoo, living on a prayer.

  Don’t stop—take a dump in your pants if you need to.

  Don’t worry—toenails are overrated.

  Run like an angry Kenyan.

  Chuck Norris never ran a marathon.

  Call a cab. It’s way faster.

  Run, Fat Boy, run!

  Bleeding nipples are hot.

  You look like crap.

  Any slower & you’d be walking.

  Appropriately, that last sign was being held up at a point 32 kilometres into the marathon, halfway up a hill. There are four hills in a row at this stage of the race. These hills are not too challenging, but after 32 Ks of running, even climbing a flight of stairs can feel like Mount Everest! The final of the four hills was given the nickname ‘Heartbreak Hill’ in 1936 by The Boston Globe and it has stuck ever since—but once you make it to the top of Heartbreak Hill, the run is fairly straightforward (although your legs will probably argue that point).

  For the final six or seven kilometres of the run the spectators on the sides of the road are about ten deep. After 35 kilometres, when your body hurts all over and all you feel like doing is having a walk for a little bit, these people cheering you on keep you going. You feel as though you’d be disappointing them by having a walk (not to mention you’d look like a bit of a dick).

  The final turn in the run is onto Boylston Street. From here it is a half mile in a straight line to the end. The finish banner gets bigger and bigger with every step you take. The bars and cafes on the side of Boylston Street are packed with cheering customers who got there first thing in the morning to secure their prime positions.

  The feeling when that finish line comes into view is incredible, a moment of my life I will never forget. This is where you realise you have done it. You are no longer a Boston qualifier or a Boston entrant. You become a Boston finisher.

  My time? 3 hours, 22 minutes, 21 seconds.

  Geoffrey Mutai’s time? 2 hours, 3 minutes.

  Yes, I finished a whopping hour and 20 minutes behind the quick Kenyan but that didn’t matter to me. Geoffrey was the winner. But Boston is a place where weekend warriors like me, the plodders of the running community, can feel like a champion regardless of time or placing.

  Whatever age you are, I reckon life is a collection of moments, good or bad, that mean something to you. It’s the really good or really horrible moments that shape us and make us who we are. They are the moments we remember and hang onto. For me, running the Boston Marathon was one of those good moments. Something I won’t forget, ever.

  Finishing Boston cost me thousands of dollars, hundreds of training hours, and three toenails. But as the marketing team at MasterCard would say: the memories and the finisher’s medal? Priceless.

  The medal and the dead toenails.

  Both badges of honour for any marathon runner.

  PRANK MY MUM

  My poor old mum. A god-fearing Catholic woman, four children, ten grandchildren. Sixty years old with no criminal record. I suspect she has been snapped speeding once or twice but otherwise she has lived a blameless life.

  This woman has not done anything to deserve such an arsehole son. Well, nothing apart from once dragging me home from school and washing my mouth out with a cake of Palmolive Gold after I was overheard swearing. In my defence, the offensive word in question was ‘blimmin’, which I thought was a lite version of ‘bloody’. Mum disagreed with my reasoning so my mouth paid the ultimate penalty.

  One weekend Mum confessed to me that she had done something naughty and felt really bad about it. She had been given a blender from Farmers as a present. She couldn’t work out how to use all the various attachments because there was no instruction booklet inside the box.

  Mum owns a laptop and has a basic grasp of how to work a PC but I think the internet frightens her a bit, so she uses it for what she knows and nothing else—she goes on Skype and Facebook to stay in touch with her grandkids dotted all around the place. But it would never occur to my old mum that she could probably Google the make and model of her blender and print out a copy of the missing manual.

  Instead, Mum did potentially the worst thing she had ever done in her six full decades of life—she went into a Farmers store and found the blender she had been given as a gift, then opened the box and stole a manual.

  Granted, this is hardly a heist that would make a decent movie plot. A great crime thriller like Usual Suspects would not have been the blockbuster that it was if Keyser Söze’s crime had been to pinch an instruction booklet for a Kambrook blender. But it was still shoplifting and still something that was playing heavily on Mum’s fragile conscience.

  I had wanted to do something evil to my mum f
or my bucket list, so when she told me her secret I saw this as the perfect opportunity. This was going to be easy to pull off. Convincing Mum that Farmers would be on her tail for this would be about as difficult as convincing a six-year-old that a tiny lady with wings flies into children’s bedrooms collecting dirty old teeth and replacing them with coins.

  So I planted the seed. I told Mum it was lucky she hadn’t been stopped by a store security guard, because they have security TV cameras everywhere that are being monitored all the time.

  This whipped poor old Mum into even more of a panic. She asked me if she should go back to the store and sneak the manual back into the box.

  I told her not to worry about it, because if she made it out of the store she’d probably got away with it. Yeah, I felt a little bit bad . . . but I knew the pay-off would be worth the stress I was causing Mum. Plus, she did wash my mouth out with soap for saying ‘blimmin’ thirty years earlier, so I kind of owed her some payback!

  A few days after Mum and I had this chat, I got my mate Kally at work to give her a call. We recorded it, with the intention of playing it back on the air further down the track. The conversation was short and ended abruptly.

  Mum: Hello, Sue speaking.

  Kally: Hello, is that Susan Harvey?

  Mum: Yes, speaking.

  Kally: Susan, this is Kerry from Farmers security . . .

  [Sound of Mum fumbling round with her phone before hanging up]

  I immediately tried to call Mum back but her phone went straight to voicemail. She had intentionally terminated the call and switched her phone off to avoid facing the music. Later that day I drove over to Mum’s place for a visit. This phone call was one of the first things she brought up.

  ‘I just went to a brand-new doctors for my foot because it’s swollen but it was so embarrassing. I think I might be in trouble. When I was with the doctor my phone went and I said, “That will be my daughter,” so I answered it and it went straight onto the loudspeaker.’