2013 - 'There was one more person I met that day who helped get me through it.'

Ed Harms

My first and only marathon happened on April 15th, 2013. Boston had been a goal of mine since graduating from the University of Delaware in 2008. I had lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, ever since then, and seeing 25,000 people running the streets of Boston with hundreds of thousands cheering them on was an experience I knew I needed to have some day.

Unfortunately, though, I was not nearly fast enough to qualify. For my age group, 3:05 is the standard, and though I have a “runner’s body,” I never started running consistently until college. I didn’t run my first 5k until my junior year, and ran my first half-marathon in 2011 with roughly a month of ‘training” (hard to even call it that now, looking back). The standards seemed so high I knew it would literally be years from the time I began training for 3:05 to the time I would be able to run Boston, so I never started. It seemed very intimidating.