They said they would. On Monday, they did.
Seven runners from the Trail Animals Running Club in Massachusetts completed what’s known as the “Double Boston” — an unofficial ultra-running challenge that involves running the entire Boston Marathon course twice in a single day, back to back, in opposite directions. They started at the finish line on Boylston Street at 3 a.m., ran the 26.2-mile course in reverse to the official start in Hopkinton, rested briefly, then rejoined the official race and ran the whole thing back into the city with the rest of the field.
Total distance: 52.4 miles. One day. One very early alarm.
The challenge isn’t new — a small number of ultra-runners have been doing it quietly for years — but this was the first time it had formal backing. Mount to Coast, a footwear brand built for extreme long-distance racing, sponsored the group and rented a house in Hopkinton to serve as a pit stop between the two legs. There, Lin, a member of the Mount to Coast team, had prepared ramen for the runners. They ate, recovered for a couple of hours, and went back out.
What makes the reverse leg particularly punishing is that Boston’s famously net-downhill course becomes mostly uphill when you flip it. Runners who know the course well will tell you the gentle downhills that carry you through the early miles are the thing that make Boston feel manageable. Take those away, and the race is a different animal entirely.
The seven runners were not exactly strangers to Boston. Maria Chevalier of Cumberland, Rhode Island, was running her 17th Boston. Jonathon Western of Topsfield had seven finishes. Kathryn Zioto of Winchester brought four, and Justin Hetherington of Boston three. For Dave Desnoyers of Nantucket and Brendan Morgan of Shillington, Pennsylvania, Monday was their first Boston Marathon. They ran it twice.
“This is my first Boston and I think doing the course twice is an appropriate celebration of the difficulty of the course,” Desnoyers said.
Each runner had their own answer to the obvious question of why.
For Zioto, who spent months restructuring her training — adding back-to-back long runs specifically to prepare for running on tired legs — it came back to something simple. “I’m doing it because my body works. That’s a gift, and the more I can enjoy it, especially with some fantastic people, the longer I’m going to go.”
Western, who ran through the dark Boston streets before sunrise with nobody else around, found something in the experience the official race simply can’t offer. “Running through the night with no one on the street, all in reverse, is a pretty cool way to experience the Boston Marathon. It’s a blessing to be able to challenge ourselves.”
Hetherington, who in the weeks before the race had described the whole endeavor as “exciting and scary,” was the most direct about what pulls someone toward 52 miles instead of 26. “I like to do hard things. I want to do things I may fail at. If you don’t do that, if you just sit in a comfort zone your entire life, then you never grow — and for me that leads to feeling depressed and anxious. So if I’m able to do something hard, something that’s proof positive that I can do hard things, then that just gives me that sanity that I need.”
