In Orbit At My 22nd Boston Marathon (2026)
Do marathoners control time? We sure try to...
There are moments in life when time loosens its grip.
Not stops, but softens, like light through fog, or a river widening just enough that you forget which direction it was rushing. Most days, time feels like a current at your back, nudging, insisting, carrying you whether you’re ready or not. But in rare moments, you step into a place where the current slows, and you can feel each second pass not as pressure, but as presence.
For me, that place is a ribbon of road stretching from Hopkinton to Boston.
I ran the 130th Boston Marathon on Monday, my 22nd Boston in a row. Which raises a reasonable question: why do we do this? Or even worse, to return, again and again, to the same long road?
I’ve come to believe it has something to do with time. In particular, as time marches relentlessly, any feeling of control is a taste of immortality.
Most of life resists clean lines.
Careers sprawl. Parenthood deepens without edges. Relationships drift and reform like weather systems. We narrate our stories as if it was a single straight path, but it is more often a looping trail through dense forest; at once familiar, disorienting, occasionally luminous.
A marathon is different. It begins. It ends. It reveals. For a few hours, time gathers itself into something you can hold.
Within the race, the world simplifies. The mind, so eager to wander, is firmly returned to the body. Breath becomes metronome. Footfall becomes language. The noise of yesterday and tomorrow recedes like a tide pulling back from shore. You are no longer assembling a life. You are moving through it.
Einstein showed us that time is not fixed. That objects in motion experience time differently. That somewhere above us, satellites drift in quiet arcs, their clocks ticking at a pace slightly askew from our own, requiring constant correction to stay in sync with the Earth below. The Artemis II astronauts returned younger than the rest of us…not enough to notice, but enough to prove that time, like distance, depends on how you travel.1
Just a few miles into the race, I already felt untethered. Not adrift, but floating just high enough to see time from a different altitude. An orbit where years begin to overlap.
Families I have passed for twenty years, their faces evolving in slow, patient increments. Children who once handed out licorice and melting otter pops now one row back, encouraging children of their own. Their familiar smiles aged like good wood, richer, and softer at the edges.
At mile 8, I paused for my 21st photo with Santa Jim Scott. For decades, he and his partner, Lynn, stood there together, Santa and Mrs. Claus, anchored to that stretch of road as faithfully as the mile marker itself, offering cheer and goodwill to passing runners.
But this year, Mrs. Claus was gone.2 A small cluster of lilies rested where she once stood. And in that quiet substitution, flesh for flower, presence for memory, time folded in on itself. The past did not feel distant. It felt adjacent. Just beyond reach, but not beyond knowing.
At mile 13, in the electric swell of the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, I caught sight of two young women calling out my name with a sign that said “Go, Scott!”. How do I know them?
They were Logan and Valentina, friends of my daughter from first grade, a dozen years ago. In their cheers I heard the echoes of them as happy children, singing at full volume along our home trails. We took a photo, smiles suspended for a fraction of a second, and then the moment dissolved back into motion.
As I trudged up Heartbreak Hill (mile 20), I passed a runner wearing the bib of the Quarter Century Club.3 Thirty-one consecutive Boston Marathons, going for his 32nd. He moved steadily, without spectacle, as if the road itself were an old companion. I wondered what he sees from the vantage point of 32…ten more finishes for me just seems crazy right now. Certainly he has reached orbital velocity? Ascended to a level of enlightenment?
He reminds me of the spacecraft, Voyager 2, that left Earth nearly half a century ago and never turned back. It has passed beyond the outer edges of our solar system now, drifting in the quiet between stars, carrying with it a small golden record with sounds of oceans, wind, human voices…proof that we were once here, alive and listening. It no longer orbits anything. It simply moves, out there in an ever-expanding nirvana.
I wondered, briefly, if that is what these long streaks become. Not just a repeating race. No longer even a ritual. But a slow departure. A widening distance from the noise of ordinary time, until what remains is only motion, memory, and the faint echo of who you have been along the way.
And yet, within it all, there is the immediacy of effort. The sharpness of breath. The gathering fatigue. The body asking questions the mind must answer without hesitation. Around me, thousands of runners moved in a shared current. Hearts beating. Legs turning. Voices rising from sidewalks and rooftops and open windows. An aria of motion and will, carried on the air like birdsong in a vast, living forest.
And then, inevitably, the finish line appears. I cross it, and the spell breaks.4
Time, patient all along, steps forward and resumes its claim. It swipes the baton without ceremony, without apology, and moves on, leaving me bent slightly forward, hands on knees, lungs searching for rhythm again. The orbit ends. Gravity returns.
I did not control time out there. But for a few brief hours, I stood close enough to see its contours. To feel its elasticity. To witness how it gathers in people, in places, in absence as much as in presence. To understand, if only faintly, that time is not something we manage. It is something we inhabit.
As the saying goes, we do not extend the years of our lives. We can only extend the life within our years.
And so, for reasons that feel less like decision and more like instinct, I just smile and know I will return again and again to this long, familiar road. Not to outrun time, or even to understand it. But simply to rise, once more, just high enough to see it. Push to where it softens my waxed wings, but not far enough to hit escape velocity….Voyager II and Mrs. Claus will welcome us all soon enough.
Although true, technically the time dilation experienced by the Artemis II astronauts in their 10-day trip would be milliseconds. Not quite Interstallar level.
A big thank you to Lynn “Mrs. Claus” Fontanella for her positivity and ever-present smile at mile 7.3 on the course, and my condolences to Santa Jim Scott and their friends and family. I was very happy to see Jim there, as I am every year. 😍
The Boston Quarter Century Club (QCC) is for those with 25+ finishes. There are ~120 current members, and their President is going for his 46th finish!
This was a cruiser race for me, all for fun, with a finish time of 3 hrs 20 min, 46 seconds. My watch says I “wasted” five of these minutes stopping to take pictures, but hey, how else can I capture time? 😎
Simply lovely.
Felt like I was flowing with you. I don’t think I know anybody who has completed 22.