A rather morbid pub trivia category therefore was revealed to be poetically uplifting and life affirming and showed us all that our memories weren\u2019t what they could be and what’s more we should all call some old lost friends and tell them we loved them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not entirely sure why I thought about that pub trivia night during today\u2019s Jacksonville Marathon.\u00a0 Perhaps because there\u2019s been a downbeat throughline plaguing the last few months of blog posts.\u00a0 Maybe the point is that though there\u2019s a lot wrong and time has taken its toll, maybe there\u2019s still a little life left in this old geezer after all.<\/p>\n
Part of it stemmed from the grizzled, disheveled, pudgy old man visage that greeted me this morning in the mirror at 2:30 AM.<\/p>\n
I skipped shaving hoping the soon-to-be 5 AM shadow would distract from the Dick Tracy\u2019s foe PruneFace I seem to have aged into and the heavy bags under my underslept eyes.\u00a0 So in the few photos I took along the way I look like the now much older, pudgier, and antithetical-maybe-I-was-adopted brother of Miami Vice\u2019s Sonny Crockett.<\/p>\n
Spoiler alert — I finished the race.<\/em><\/p>\n All the above lame pop culture references are just distractions as I\u2019m trying not to amble down the path of woe-is-me-lane.\u00a0 So please excuse the crudity and stream-of-popness of this post.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve run Jacksonville before.\u00a0 The first time was in 2014.\u00a0 And then I ran it again in 2016 \u2013 I even wrote about that the \u201916 race as one of the very first entries on this blog and you can read about it HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n So today was something of a rerun.\u00a0 A literal re-run.\u00a0 I recalled a few of the twists and turns, including the super cruel down and back 1 mile detour at 24 to get to the right distance for finishing on the Bolles School track.\u00a0 It was a crisp 50-ish degrees at the start and pretty ideal running weather throughout.\u00a0 I tried to focus therefore on the run and tried not to take too many photos\u2026 all the moreso as my tailbone cried out in pain starting around mile 13 and didn\u2019t stop the dull throbbing pain until\u2026 well\u2026 it still hasn\u2019t.\u00a0 So I was trying to just \u201cgit \u2018r done\u201d in sports movie parlance.<\/p>\n I saw my cushioned Boston Qualifying time ebb and flow\u2026 but in the end I did struggle across the finish line with a BQ time of 3:12:25.<\/p>\n According to the Boston Athletic Association<\/a>,<\/p>\n \u201cQualifiers who were two minutes, nine seconds (2:09) or faster than the Qualifying time for their age group and gender were accepted into the 2017 Boston Marathon.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So if that holds true for 2018, my cushion of 2:35 under the 3:15 qualifying time for my age would get me in.<\/p>\n And while the 2017 event had one of the biggest differentials, historically I still should be ok with this time if I do decide to go out for Boston one more time:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/IMG_8588-121.jpg\")
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