For the past three years, my family has upheld the same end-of-summer tradition: On a Saturday in mid-August, we drive four hours north of San Francisco until we hit Eureka. On Sunday, we run the Humboldt Bay Marathon.
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There’s a workout called the progression run, in which you gradually increase your speed over time. The progression run is a question of control, of discipline. Can you force yourself to go slow in the beginning when you know you’re capable of going much faster, when your instinct is to pick up the pace? Can you push yourself to go faster in the end, when it’s much harder to do so than it would have been in the beginning, when your body wants to slow down?
At the core of the progression run is the concept of negative splits, or running the second half of something faster than the first. Most studies agree it’s physiologically the most optimal way to tackle a big race. Saving your fastest miles for last means that you better conserve the glycogen you need to fuel your running, that you improve your thermoregulation, that you reduce lactic acid production, that you transport oxygen to your muscles better, that you delay fatigue.
And, as one running coach puts it in Trail Running Magazine, “How you run a race is just as important as the final result. If you’re able to finish in a way that makes you feel good—if you can finish strong—you’re much more likely to consider the race a success and feel more fulfilled by your performance.”
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I grew up surrounded by marathons.
By now, my mother has run over 60 of them. She has literally lost count of exactly how many she’s done. She once ran three in the span of 13 days.
This was something sort of incomprehensible for the vast majority of my life, in which a 5K was a difficult, rare, and weekend-consuming event. As an unathletic child, and later teenager, I would ask my mother how her races went. Her reply was often a critical one—“too slow, not what I was hoping for.” Having no concept of what was “good,” I always wondered at how she could be self-deprecating moments after completing 26.2 miles. Even after I’d started running marathons of my own, when my mother disparaged her own considerably faster times, I’d always ask, “How could you ever consider that slow? How could you ever not be proud?”
My mom ran the 5K and 10K in college. Her coach didn’t allow her to run marathons while in season. I think she’s grateful for it now. Since she started running them years after graduating, she doesn’t have to compare her current times to those of a younger and faster version of herself.
My mom says that I am getting faster and she is getting slower, and that one day our lines will cross in an x—hers a negative slope, mine a positive one. She’s 57. Age does objectively slow you down at a certain point, but she’s wrong about herself. Last year, she ran her fastest time in over 15 years—three hours, 22 minutes. A few months later, she did it again. She seems to forget this fact every time she runs something slower.
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My mother was with me for my first marathon: Humboldt Bay, 2023.
The charm of Humboldt is something you have to experience to fully understand. The drive up is half of it—simple yet gorgeous, roads tracing the sides of the mountains, coursing through thick patches of redwood trees, stretches of nowhere that feel almost holy.
At the end of it is Eureka, at the very top of the state right before you hit Oregon. Marked by its colorful purple and green Victorian homes and a quiet path along its coast, it’s small and quaint, much like the marathon that runs through its downtown.
The marathon starts at 7 a.m. on Sunday. About fifty or so runners congregate at the start line—much fewer than most marathons, lending the event an almost casual, run club feel. The morning usually starts out at about 55 degrees with a cloud cover that burns off by the time you’re done running. Ideal conditions.
That year, it didn’t matter what time I got, so long as I made it the whole way through. Your first marathon is your fastest by default. The minute I crossed the finish line, the daunting goal that had once seemed an unattainable achievement of my mother’s suddenly became doable all along.
My mother might have been more excited than I was. With a medal hanging around my neck, donning me a marathoner, she turned to me and asked if I would do another one. Before I could properly respond, she answered for me: yes. Yes, you have to. There was something of an implied statement of encouragement: You finished so strong. You could finish even faster next time. And I knew it too—I could do better. I could train smarter, race harder.
***
For many runners, the Boston Marathon is the ultimate goal. I can’t remember when it became mine. It’s easy to say it was the second I crossed the finish line for the first time at the 2023 Humboldt Bay Marathon, but back then I hadn’t even been sure I would run another one at all. What I do remember is when the dream truly solidified into something concrete.
My mom runs Boston almost every year—she has over 20 successful finishes under her belt. Last April, two weeks before the Providence Marathon, I took the MBTA and then the T to mile 20—the base of Heartbreak Hill, the beginning of a brutal climb Boston is infamous for—equipped not with Alphaflys and a Garmin, but instead with a big green dinosaur balloon and my loudest cheering voice.
She was, as she often is, unhappy with her result, as it wasn’t the PR she’d been hoping for. But the day before, I had accompanied her on her shakeout run (a brief and easy run before a race) on the path along the Charles, marveling at another New England spring, blossoms bursting from the trees along the river. I could see why it is her favorite race to run, in spite of her disinclination towards hill training (which she has passed down to me). We were immediately joined by crowds of people all doing their shakeout runs at the same time. It practically felt like a race of its own. I even saw a couple spectating, cheering on the shakers with foam fingers.
My mom looks forward to Boston every year because of the energy of the crowds on the sidelines, the consistency of signs that line the whole course, and the fact that so many people she knows and loves run it every year too. The way that, for just one Monday a year, the sport envelops the entire city, the marathon and Boston completely inextricable from one another, perfectly entangled. Schools give the day off. Dozens of streets close down. Everyone watches. In the elevator back to my mom’s hotel room after the marathon, medal hanging around her neck, sweat clinging to her pink tank top, someone asked us if we’d both just run. She assured them confidently that, “She’s running it next year.”
Stating it as a fact felt arrogant, but for the first time, Boston 2026 seemed like it was actually within reach. It was the first time I’d seen firsthand what my mother had talked about for years. It was also the first time I’d finally gotten close enough for it to be possible.
***
To get into Boston, you have to qualify. But even that is usually not good enough.
Boston registration involves submitting race results from a certified course during a four-day application period in September. In order to apply, you must hit Boston’s qualifying times, which are announced about a year or more before race registration opens. These are simple. You know what time you’re shooting for well in advance of the race you try to qualify at, and you either run fast enough, or you don’t. The standards for Boston 2026 were five minutes faster for each age group than they were in 2025—for my age group, a 3:25, down from a 3:30. In Providence, two weeks after spectating the Boston Marathon, I ran a 3:22:56—my first ever Boston qualifying time.
Usually, though, more people meet qualifying standards than Boston can accept. Marathoning’s popularity has spiked in recent years. And so, each application cycle, you must make the “cutoff”—an amount of time subtracted from the qualifying times for each age group depending on how many people qualify. There is no way to know what these will be before you submit your registration application. 3:22:56 is not a huge buffer from 3:25—but it’s within the range of possibility. It would have made the cut for any other Boston Marathon, but things get more and more competitive every year.
Providence, though, is a course with some elevation gain. Humboldt Bay is not. My mother reasoned that if I was capable of a 3:22:56 on a hillier course, I could certainly run a sub-3:20—which would give me a safe buffer—on a flat one.
With the rate that I was improving, it seemed like she could be right.
***
My time at Providence was a 15-minute PR, run with another very negative split. The last six miles of any marathon have always been my favorite part. The moment when the end is in sight, when you know you have more to give, when you feel like you’re improving each and every mile, when you know that this race will be better than the last one.
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My third Humboldt Bay Marathon was a little different from years prior. For the first time, I spent most of my summer outside of California. By then a two-time survivor of East Coast winters, I had yet to experience what I had, erroneously, considered a kinder season. As it turned out, summer is a monster of its own. Long runs in heat waves meant that suddenly “easy pace” didn’t feel so easy anymore. My breezy jogs along the foggy bay were replaced with treks beneath a vindictive sun that beat down like a weighted vest, like worn-out shoes, like a miscalibrated treadmill. Everything is harder in the heat. I began to miss the days of trudging through February slush with sleet in the air and fingers too cold to move.
Temperatures, conspiring with a few minor injuries, an insufficient recovery period after Providence, and a general lack of will, meant my training, my goal time, and my general confidence that I actually enjoy running faded from the forefront of my mind. Degree by degree, the months and then the minutes slipped away.
At the familiar start line, my anxious, quick heartbeat a harbinger of the real drumming to come, I had no idea what to expect of myself. My speed work had gone out the window. And then, arrogantly, there was that pulsing hope still coursing through my body. What if what if what if.
***
Make it to mile 20, and you have it from there. You know you always have it at mile 20.
But once I started 22, the seconds and then the minutes began to drag out. Slower and slower splits. Nausea that didn’t die down when it usually did, after the bullhorn. Dead legs that screamed I was a failure.
There’s a popular saying in the running community: Positive splits for positive people.
But that’s not how getting slower feels. It feels, at best, like a miscalculation. At worst, the realization that you think too highly of yourself—that you don’t know yourself as well as you once thought you did.
And at the start line all those miles ago, what did I know myself as? A negative splitter, or a fast finisher, or an improver? And when had that changed from that unathletic girl who stared at my sweat-drenched mother in awe and thought her medals were impossible? And what would that girl have thought of me now? What would that girl have thought of a failure at mile 22?
There’s a popular piece of advice from a novel by Samuel Beckett: Fail better.
That’s exactly what I did. For the first time ever, I ran my second-fastest marathon. For the first time ever, I ran a marathon and did not get better. Instead, I commiserated with my mother, who also did not achieve her sub-3:20 goal that day. Instead, I crossed the finish line, for the first time, defeated. Same town, same race, different drive home.
There’s a psychological phenomenon: We gravitate towards linear progress. We lose the forest for the trees; we lose the good races in the bad. We want to feel like our careers are progressing, like we’re getting better job offers and promotions than we got last year. We want better test scores, better grades this term than the last one. We want to earn more in Q2 than in Q1, and we want our writing to be better than it used to be, and we want better mental health, better relationships with the people around us, better love lives, better style, better fitness. We want to feel like we’re improving. We want that simple drive up or down, the one without stops, the one without navigation. We want the progression run, each mile faster than the last.
And there’s the obvious truth that life is no perfect Strava bar graph, no ruler-straight trendline pointing up. And it’s obvious to the little girls watching their mothers, and it’s obvious to the little girls watching their older selves become failures tens of miles farther than they ever thought they could go at all.
***
Of the 33,249 qualifying runners who applied to compete in the 130th Boston Marathon, 24,362 were accepted. I wasn’t one of them.
There’s a modified quote I’ve repeated to myself since my “Notice of Non-Acceptance”: fail faster.
And that’s not the phrase that was going through my mind when reading the email, and it’s not the way I felt at mile 22, and it’s not how I’m going to feel after most of my positive split runs, my moments of deviation from the trendline. But it is how I feel setting my sights on Boston 2027, knowing the cutoff times will continue to get more and more competitive, hoping that I get faster faster than they do. And it’s exactly how I feel knowing that my mom will race a 3:20 someday, even if she has to run a few more 3:30s first.
