So to catch up you friends who didn’t get a chance to read about how I came to meet and have lunch with Tish Hamilton, check out last week’s post! This is Tish, she is awesome.

Basically where I left off, Tish is AMAZING. She has run 48 marathons like a champ and inspired me to run my first official marathon in the fall! But more on that later…

First let’s talk about Boston.

So Tish in her talk, naturally talked a lot about the Boston Marathon. For all you runners out there you know what a big deal Boston is, how it is a qualifying race, and basically the finals of road races. And you probably also know it is this Monday!! One of my favorites is running it and it should be great!

For any of you who aren’t familiar with Boston, here is Tish’s description “The Boston Marathon: Even the nonfaithful know that it is the holy-grail accomplishment, the one that marks a runner as “serious.” The runner who has qualified for the Boston Marathon has managed, through a combination of happy genetic destiny and hard, focused training (not to mention forbearing friends and family), to clock 26.2 miles in a certain time, adjusted for age and gender, that allows him or her to enter the race. It’s a pretty exclusive club.”

Anyways, Tish, being a runner always loved the Boston Marathon (like I mentioned last post, she qualified for it in her first marathon ever!!!), has run it 11 times and even ran the Boston Marathon and saw two of the bombs explode in front of her. Being a journalist she has gotten many opportunities to construct articles around Boston.

In 2013, she got the opportunity to not only write the piece on the Boston Marathon, but also run it. Her article, “The Life of a Squeaker” was nothing more than beautiful and inspiring. She writes from the experience of the people in the middle, the ones who barely qualified for Boston, but qualified nonetheless.

“They see you based on your qualifying time” but really, as runners, ins’t our qualifying time is proof enough of being a super human.

Tish is definitely super human, she is able to convey the feelings of so many proud runners while creating journalistic brilliance, relating to the reader and inspiring others.

Another piece she wrote that year about Boston was about Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher training for Boston together. She reminded us runners at the lunch that we should “always run your own pace.” These Olympic runners, though friends are also competition. I think this is one of the coolest things about being a runner, you train with friends knowing you won’t fully run a race together, you know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and on race day  realize all strengths will be heightened.

One of the most striking things Tish said to us was, “itsn’t it cool that we are on the same course with these people who are a different species” like Kara and Shalane.

I agree completely, and this is one of the reasons I love running!

When asked, “How do you stay motivated to keep running? You said that after you hit the wall in a half marathon you feel like you never want to run again, yet you’re on your 48th marathon and keep signing up for more! What keeps you motivated?”