Boston 2019 All in – my  21st Boston Marathon (Audio: link) audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/Boston2019.mp3] Link  Boston2019.mp3 MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - http://www.marathonbq.com/qualify-for-the-boston-marathon-in-14-weeks/ … I didn’t sleep great the night before.  Part of it was the driving rain and the thunder and lightning that shook the house.  Part of it was my ruminating brain.  You might think that having such a great training cycle would allow me to rest easy. But, no, it somehow raised the stakes.  My trusty subconscious was chattering away.  What if after all this work I managed to screw up the race? What if the weather was bad?  Of course I tied to let my big brain take over and talk myself down from the window ledge.  I am grateful to be here. Yeah.  I am happy to still be doing this 20+ years in?  Yeah.  I am blessed?  Yeah.  Blah, blah, blah… After 20 years you’d think I’d be able to rationalize.  Repetition doesn’t lower the stakes.  This is the Boston Marathon.  It matters to me.  I put in the work.  I qualify.  It matters.  It matters to me. … I rolled out of bed reasonably refreshed and put on my throw-away clothes.  With the lingering rain I didn’t want to wear my race stuff, especially my shoes.  Stay dry as long as possible.  I had time to take a nice shower and have a bit of breakfast.  A normal day at the Russell house.  My wife dropped me off at the local Starbucks where I caught a ride with some of the folks from my running club out to Hopkinton.  Without incident I hopped the spectator bus to downtown Hopkinton and made my way over to the senior center to join Eric and the St. Louis runners.  My second year of avoiding Athletes’ Village. Call me soft, but warm and dry with a bathroom beats ankle deep mud and a 45 minute porta-john line.  I stretched and rubbed and pre-gamed.  Got my race gear on and lubed up really well.  With the humidity and warmer temps I figured chaffing might be an issue.  I ran in my old Hoka Cliftons, split shorts and a race singlet.  Nothing fancy.  I wore the Boston Strong hat I had bought at the expo.  I felt like that was an appropriate message for my training cycle and my race plan.  Like Coach said in his pep talk to me;  it didn’t matter if it was 100 degrees or if there were 80 mile an hour winds.  I was not going to waste this training cycle.  No matter what happened I was committed.  I wasn’t giving myself any option to give up or to ease off.  No matter what I was all in.  I would control the only thing any of us really controls; my commitment to fight – to be strong.  We watched the early waves start on TV.  We saw the wheelchair finish, which seemed a bit strange to see people finish a race you are an hour away from starting.  In the room were several faster, red-bib, wave 2 runners.  That seemed to be the demographic in general.  Lots of fit, young, fast runners in Nike Vapor Fly’s and a handful of us old war horses.  Eric and I were in the same wave and corral.  3/3, which put us up the hill not far from the start line. Without hurry we made our way over when the time was right. … It’s an electric time.  Walking to the start of the Boston marathon.  If you could somehow drop an emotional energy meter into the center of Hopkinton Massachusetts it would be bouncing off the rails and maxing out.  Thousands of qualified athletes stepping into the culmination of their training cycles.  Each one a story of dedication and perseverance and, right now, in this very moment, at their emotional peak.  This is it.  The big test.  The qualification effort is well in the past.  The months of training and sacrifice all leading in an inevitable emotional march to this day and this moment.  The atmosphere buzzes like an electric field.  Eric and I made our way out of the senior center in the misty, post-rain, cool, overcast morning.  The sun was struggling to break through the remnants of the storms that had passed.  We wa