I ran my 3d Boston Marathon this year, and am writing this post to tell you what’s it’s like, and what the big deal is regarding “Heartbreak Hill”.

Background: I’ve run 3 Boston Marathons, and this one was the one I trained the hardest and most properly for by doing longer runs, training for months and having specific time goals I wanted to attain.  I started training when I was 229 pounds and was hovering around 180 pounds on race day.  The last marathon I ran was 7 years before this on e(2011) and I weighed 160 pounds at that running.

I’m not a fast runner, and that’s something that is going to have to be trained out of me if I’m ever going to get a time under 4 hours, and that is something that has to be trained INTO me by increasing my natural long distance running pace.  2011 time was 4 hours 7 minutes and 15 seconds, and this was the first time I ran the marathon without having to stop and walk for a little bit (wanted to though! ).

OK, so what’s running the Boston Marathon like?

It’s fun, exciting, long, yet not so long, and a world-class enjoyable event if you try to make it so…

It’s easy for the first 12 miles because the hype is looming large in your consciousness, there’s college girls cheering you rather loudly which adds an extra kick to your stride, and elevation wise, it’s pretty much even/downhill for the first 12 miles or so.

Most first timers will run too fast during these 12 miles then get a nasty wake up call at the first hill they encounter after 12 miles mark.

It also sort of sucks trying to keep to a certain dedicated running pace when you’re dodging runners almost the entire route, which is why it’s best to try and get into a corral for a charity group of runners then take off with them (as a real charity runner of course).

In my opinion, the Boston Marathon has 2 parts, the easy first 12, then the real hard part which is miles 12-26.2.

The hardest hill I encountered, and still remains the hardest part of the route for me, is the big hill at mile 17 or thereabouts…  There’s a little bit of a crowd thinning at this point, everyone’s chilling, sitting, eating, drinking, relaxing and cheering and like most amateur runners, I’m sort of gassed at any distance beyond mile 15, so when there’s a big long hill at mile 17, it’s a killer, especially knowing that there’s the dreaded Heartbreak Hill to encounter still!

Heartbreak Hill or rather the heartbreak hillS, are a joke!

It’s more like a series of hills spread out form miles 20-23 and the reason it’s hyped up so much is because in just about every long distance event, there’s runners dropping down to walking at any mile past 15, but especially so at every mile beyond that point.

So the series of hills encountered in miles 20-23 are runner-killers but in my training I’ve run up worse hills, just not at the 20-23 mile points.

The reason I decided to write about this is, most people think there’s a certain hard part to the Boston Marathon, and that it’s called Heartbreak Hill, when the reality is, any hill or semi-incline past mile marker 15 is going to be tough for amateur runners like myself.  Also, this is the first time I actually remember what these hills were like and was dreading them so much for whatever reason.

So don’t believe the hype about this…. if you can run 15 miles in a training run, you can run continuously at least to mile 20 without stopping, and if you can run 20 miles in a training run, then you can run through the series of heartbreak hills without stopping, too.