This was such a great day. I gotta do it again.

Maybe I’ve told this story before but this is probably a different audience so I don’t mind repeating it:

Back in April of 1997 as a freshman at Boston University I lived on South Campus on Beacon Street and I was woken early on a Saturday or Sunday morning by a lot of banging outside my window.

There were crews putting out barriers and I didn’t fully understand what was happening…but I guessed that it might have something to do with the Boston Marathon.

I don’t know if I realized that the race would go right past my building.

It was the first time I had seen a marathon live in person. (It was not my first Boston Marathon experience - that was two years earlier when I went on a tour of BU and somehow we drove up to Boston and parked on BU’s campus on Marathon Monday. My brother and my uncle saw the marathon while my dad and I did the tour. I often think about how crazy it was that we drove into Boston that day - and that we drove around the city later that day and did not realize the huge mess we narrowly avoided getting ourselves into traffic-wise.)

Anyway, watching the marathon that day and all the people running down my street for hours was the first time I had the thought “I wonder if I could do that.”

I thought that for the next 20-plus years as I figured out that there were ways I could actually run the Boston Marathon and then started to attempt to take advantage of them.

In 2020 I finally got on the wait list for Team Framingham - the city gets a certain number of bibs that they hold a lottery for, and the selected runners run for a local charity.

That race got canceled, but the team members had the opportunity to stay on to run the 2021 marathon…and almost everyone from the team came back. I was number 10 on the wait list, and there were 9 wait list runners used.

And then in May I got an e-mail that someone on the team had moved out of Framingham. Would I be able to run the 2021 Boston Marathon? (That year the race was postponed until October.)

It was thrilling.

And then I was lucky enough to be selected in the 2022 lottery and I ran the Boston Marathon again.

I had a great round of training in 2021 and then came out too fast and my legs were killing me by mile 16. The last 10 miles were a real struggle.

In 2022 I paced myself much better and did a much better job of enjoying the race experience overall.

Both times had their unique great memories - the October race offered some pictures with fall foliage. Both times the weather was great. I didn’t realize how different the October race day vibe was, though, until I ran the regularly-scheduled marathon the following April, which was electric.

I have been a spectator the past couple of years. It always makes me a little emotional to watch everyone go by…and there’s a little jealousy too because it’s such a cool experience.

(Although I admit to not being very jealous about the too-warm temperatures on Marathon Monday last year.)

I hopefully will run the Boston Marathon at least one more time.

This year will offer another new Boston Marathon experience, though - I’ll be volunteering for the first time.

And I’ll be telling you all about that this week.