Imagine Yourself Winning A Marathon.

Amby Burfoot, for those of you who don’t know is the winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon, among others, a “Runners world” Editor and author. last week he celebrated 40 years of his Boston marathon win and writes a good post on it.

I was just 21 when I won Boston, not yet a college grad. It couldn’t have been a bigger thrill. My coach and running inspiration John J. Kelley had been the last American victor in 1957, 11 years before me. Of course, there’s a down side to everything. When you succeed at something unimaginable when you’re just 21, there’s only one way to go afterwards. I’ve been following that trajectory for a long time.

Amby Ran the marathon again this year, but without the ambition to win.

No I won’t try to run hard on Monday. I haven’t done that in a marathon for nearly 20 years. I’m willing to push to the edge in 5 milers and even half-marathons, but not over the full 26.2. I’m hoping to keep it comfortable for as long as possible and to finish in about 3:59. I’m scared primarily because I haven’t gone the marathon distance in two years, not since Napa Valley 2006. So it’s looming large in my mind again. And I haven’t covered more than 15 miles in a recent training run–good reason to find a sustainable pace. I’ll have a small flotilla of pacers with me. You’re welcome to join in if you see us. The most important of these runners is my first training partner, John Valentine. John’s three years younger than me and was dumb enough in the mid-1960s–when I was beginning to rack up impressive training mileages, and he was just 15–to agree to do many workouts with me. You never forget your first training partner, and it’s even better when you can continue to mark important running occasions with him 40+ years later.

I think this man is admirable - not only to runners and in the running word but in general - as a role model on how to approach life philosophically He ends the post with this sentence

I just want to finish. And after I finish, I want to start looking for the next starting line. I don’t know if there’s more to life than this.

To read the whole post go here