Take a deep breath. Sitting down? Doesn’t matter. I just submitted my registration for THE. BOSTON. MARATHON. Ah!!! Yes! Ok, now calm down.

Note I say “submitted my registration”, not “registered”. That’s because they need to take a look at everyone who

wants to run the race and determine if there’s enough room (details below). I’m hoping my time (3:03:36) is good enough to get me into the race. It should be, but you just never know.

Before I do anything else, just gotta give a shout out and thank you to Colin for convincing me that it could be done. After my first marathon (2007 Marine Corps – 3:53:42) I was just amazed I finished. How far we’ve come. I qualified at Vermont 50 minutes (and 6 seconds) faster, four and a half years later. From then until Vermont I had no disillusionment of actually qualifying for Boston, but Colin kept pressing the issue. Well here we are. Thanks buddy.

And bear with me, but I must give one big thank you to my support crew. Hazel as my training partner and Ev as my incredibly understanding and loving wife. It might be cliché, but I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you more than you know.

Now it’s time to wait. Anyone who qualified can register from now through Friday. That’s when they close the doors, check how many people registered, and then either say “we’re full” or open it back up until it finally sells out. I won’t know if I’m officially registered until as late as October 1st. Sheesh. Hopefully they’re so amazed by my application that the race director personally calls me. Or they can just shoot me an automated email ASAP. Either way.

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p>Overly detailed explanation: If more people want to run than there is room, then they start cutting people with the slowest times until they get to their target number. Last year, for example, the qualifying time was 3:10 (for my age group), but because there were too many people who wanted to run, the real cut off was actually 3:08:46. So you could’ve qualified with 3:09:30 and not been admitted. This year they made the qualification standards more difficult, requiring everyone to run 5 minutes faster than previous years. Will it be enough to reduce the number of applicants? I sure hope so.