Hopkinton to Framingham

    Once the third wave began, all of the runners slowly started moving forward towards the starting line like a huge herd of cattle being shuttled out to a field.  Its hard to imagine how crowded a two lane road can get when you cram over 8,000 people (the third wave) onto it.  Since I was in corral 7, it took me about a minute to even get up to the starting line.  I hung to the right side of the road since I knew that's where my friend Lyn would be since she volunteers in the human chain ... a group of people who essentially serve as a barrier preventing people from starting early.  Thankfully, I was able to give her a quick hug and then I was off.
    Since this was my first marathon, I was open to pretty much everyone's advice as to how best to approach the race.  I had heard from many sources, including Tom who I consider the most knowledgeable about the course, that the key to the first part of the marathon is to pace yourself.  This sounds easy, I know, but Boston's layout is notoriously tricky since there is a steep loss of elevation over the first several miles of the course.  This part of the course has tricked many runners into thinking that they were having "the best day ever" and running faster than they should have at the start of the race.  This leads to problems later in the race when you hit the hills of Newton.
     Since I knew I likely didn't have the training to run the whole entire race owing to the fact that my longest run prior to the race was only 15 miles, I came up with a few strategies that I thought would get me through the run.  The first strategy, was to make sure I followed everyone's advice and paced myself during this first part of the race.  While it sounds easily, my goal was to run at a 10:30 min / mile pace since I thought this is likely where my pace would end up for the race.  A couple of the things that make this hard to do is at the start of the race you are overcome with adrenaline / excitement, you are surround by thousands of runners many of which are running quickly and the topography is downhill which just increases your speed without even thinking about it. 
      Early in the race, my pace wasn't a big issue due to the fact that the road was so crowded with runners that you couldn't even speed up even if you had wanted to.  After about 0.5 miles the crowd thinned out a little bit and we hit some downhill slopes.  I kept looking down at the gps watch and at times my pace dipped down to the 9:20 min / mile range so I made the effort to slow down to my 10:30 goal.  Before I knew it, the first two miles had flown by and I left Hopkinton and entered Ashland.  Thankfully, this was familiar territory to me because I had run the Ashland - Natick leg of the race on the 20 mile run that I had bombed.
       Overall, I felt great this early in the race.  The sun was out, it was warm and for once in my running career the wind was at my back.  I know this is going to sound weird, but I am not lying when I say that I was smiling for the duration of this race ... especially at the beginning.  The run as going well, the weather was great, there were runners all around and the streets were lined with families and kids cheering us all on.  I made and effort to run on the side of the road and give out as many high 5's as I could to the people on the side of the road. 
       Before I knew it, Ashland turned into Framingham.  The elevation seemed to flatten out a little bit and we were running on pretty flat terrain.  In addition, the sea of runners also thinned out and we finally had some room to maneuver around the road.  I was still feeling strong, keeping my pace at 10:20 or so and thankfully free of pain at this point.  Since it was pretty warm out, I decided that I would snag a cup of gatorade and a cup of water at each water stop (1 mile intervals) that I came up to.  In addition, I was giving Scott Jurek's advice a try and decided to eat one Gu packet (27 g of carbs) every 5 kilometers to make sure I could keep my energy up. 
        I crossed the 10 km mark in about 1 hr 5 mins ... which was a great pace for me.  My personal record for a 10k is 55 mins or so, but today I was totally on pace for where I needed to be.  The other part that made crossing the 10k mark special was that this was really the only time that Renee and I were running together.  Since her training had gone so well, I knew that we were going to be running this race at different paces ... and after a minute or two ... she took off ... only to be seen again at the finish line! 
        Overall, the first 10k of the race went great.  I was keeping the pace I had hoped for, the weather was great, I felt strong and I didn't have any injuries at this point ....

Visual depiction of the huge drops in elevation during the start of the race!  Like I said, any seasoned Boston runner will tell you that your race can be won / lost based on how you pace yourself during this period.  Come out too strong and you will get destroyed by the Newton Hills later in the race.