From VA Peninsula Media By
After six years of training, York County resident Tim Ryan can finally call himself a Boston Marathon runner.
Ryan, 48, completed the Boston Marathon on Monday with a time of 4:09:42. He ran in the 46-50 age group with a qualifying time of 3:12:12.
“I had a bad running day and wanted to enjoy the experience. The hard work was getting there,” he noted.
Tim Ryan, Executive Director, StartWheel
There were 25,000 people who ran the marathon, which is smaller than usual due to COVID.
The morning of the marathon, everyone in the city was so happy and appeared to be thankful, he said. This is the first in-person Boston Marathon since the pandemic. “Even our Uber driver said ‘the city is alive again’,” Ryan noted.
During the marathon, crowds lined the street to cheer the runners. “That was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They were cheering so loud I couldn’t hear the music on my iPods,” he said. The cheering crowd “forced everyone to keep going,” he added.
Ryan shared the experience with his wife, Terri, and son, Drew, who is on the cross-country team at Tabb High School.
Running is a daily habit for Ryan. Since he began training for the marathon six years ago, he taken a run 2,887 days.
In the final months leading up to the race, Ryan ran an average of 50 miles a week, breaking it down to between seven to eight miles per day.
“Running is just part of my life,” he said.
