Five years ago, in miserable conditions, Manchester Running Company made history at the Boston Marathon
Tyler Lyon and Morgan Kennedy just wanted to get into some clean dry clothes. They had just run the 2018 Boston Marathon, the year that icy rain, freezing temperatures and 25 mph headwinds forced a number of elite runners to drop out of the race.
Lyon, of West Hartford, and Kennedy, of Portland, had finished the marathon and were well outside of Boston, on their way back to Connecticut, when their running club’s director called.
“He said, ‘Hey, are you guys at the awards ceremony?’” Kennedy said. “We said no. It was inconceivable that we could have won something with the day we all had.”
But Lyon, Kennedy and their Manchester Running Company teammate Ryan Palmison had won the men’s open team award, the first time a team from Connecticut had done so.
Usually, it’s the high-powered elite teams like the Boston Athletic Association, the Bowerman Track Club out of Oregon or the Greater Boston Track Club that top the team standings. But that day was crazy, with a relatively unknown marathoner from Japan named Yuki Kawauchi braving the adverse conditions to win the men’s title and Des Linden pushing through to become the first American woman to win at Boston since 1985.
Both Lyon, 29, and Kennedy, 35, will be back on Monday for the 127th Boston Marathon but have no expectations about winning any team titles. Lyon is aiming for a mid-2:40 finish, while Kennedy will be happy with a 2:45.
Five years ago, they had no expectations either.
“The team competition, so many elite athletes and runners dropped out, I can’t say we were the strongest team going in but we were the ones who survived at the end,” Lyon said. “It was a pretty unforgettable feeling.
“It was just so wildly unexpected and a validation for the survival of Boston that year.”
The day before the race was beautiful when Lyon and Kennedy met up for a pre-race shake-out run but the forecast was ominous: cold rain with 30 mph wind gusts, a perfect recipe for runners to suffer from hypothermia. Some of the elite runners came to the start line wearing raincoats, unheard of at the Boston Marathon. Many, including Olympians Galen Rupp and Deena Kastor and several former Boston Marathon champions, eventually dropped out.
Lyon and Kennedy wore singlets and arm sleeves.
“All the elites were wearing rain gear,” Lyon said. “But Morgan and myself, our egos were too inflated, you pick out your race kit days in advance and we were in singlets and arm sleeves. We made it a little harder than we probably should have.”
It was Lyon’s first Boston Marathon and he was excited. He went out fast. Kennedy, who was running Boston for the fifth time, took it slower. They hadn’t planned to run together but they saw each other at Mile 11 and ran for the next nine miles together.
“I think the forecast was three-quarters to an inch of rain an hour and a sustained headwinds of 25 mph with gusts of 30-40 mph,” Kennedy said. “You couldn’t hear the people around you talking. You had to yell. Everybody ran in packs, you rotated, taking turns who was going to be up front.
“There were a lot of people who run to compete for money and truly fast times and those people dropped out of the race, because they run the risk of getting injured and losing a large section of their season. We are enthusiasts and embrace the sport so we stuck it out, as inconvenient and difficult as the conditions were – and it was a lot of fun.
“It really was. You can only get so wet.”
Said Lyon: “We were both struggling. It became a survival instinct.”
The conditions were so bad even the spectators bailed. David Fusfeld, another MRC member who is running at Boston this year, went there to watch and cheer on his teammates but didn’t stay long.
“A couple of us went and were standing out there in that horrible rain, getting blown over by the wind,” Fusfeld said. “We saw the top 5-6 people go by. We were trying to wait for our friends but we were like, ‘We can’t stand out here any more. This is awful.’ We saw the wheelchairs go by, our top guys, Morgan and Tyler and we saw the women go by – but once the 3-hour-ish people went by, it was too much.”
Said Lyon: “On Heartbreak Hill, my mom started crying when she saw me go by. That was the first marathon where she watched me. I looked absolutely miserable. I was feeling actually pretty strong. I left Morgan but he caught up. It wasn’t until afterwards that it set in how high a place we were able to get.”
Kennedy finished 39th in 2:34:07; Lyon 54th, in 2:35:38 and Palmison 94th in 2:37:30.
Their awards came in the mail.
“It was miserable but miserable in a ‘commiserate with other people’ way,” Kennedy said. “When you have that shared experience with so many other people, it crosses a line from being inconvenient and uncomfortable to being absurd.
“Once you see the cosmic humor in running a race where you’ve done so much preparation and so much training and you’re in the best shape you’ve ever been in and then you have such adverse conditions, it feels cosmically funny.”
