If You Read One Article Today: Read About Boston

Sports provide a kind of social circadian rhythm. They are an ordering mechanism, a way to set the clock. Every baseball fan can tell you the psychic significance of Opening Day…In Boston, the marathon is an annual reset. High-level competitive running is a niche pastime, to say the least; most people don’t think about it the rest of the year. But for one day, in Boston, it seems like the only thing that matters.
Ruth Perkins, a running coach in Puyallup, Washington, described (Boston) as “the Olympics for the average runner.”
Tom Daniels, who has run nineteen marathons, including all six majors (Boston, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, London, and Berlin), called (Boston) “a marathoner’s Mecca,” adding, “It’s the hardest. Not necessarily the largest, but the oldest, traditional, most brutally physical of the six.” What makes the biggest difference, he said, is the crowd. “The whole city is a marathoner that day.”
Part of what makes a marathon special, after all, is the spontaneous intimacy that it generates. The enduring image of the sport may be a lonely runner on an empty road, but marathons are communal. Runners aren’t separated by lanes, as they are on a track. They move in masses, and within those packs they dodge and draft. Spectators aren’t always neatly cordoned off—they don’t sit in assigned seats, and they don’t have tickets. They jostle with one another. They reach into the race, to offer high fives or cups of water.