A very good friend of mine has run 8 Bostons. This year will be especially special for him as he will be pushing his daughter in a wheelchair and he will get to see the course mostly “empty” as he sets off right after the Elite Women.
He is a very talented and wise runner. He is the same old guy who even split NYC (1:29:59/1:29:59) years ago that I wrote about earlier in the week.
I shared a dinner with him and some other friends just two weeks ago and Mrs. Stone and I were talking to him about race strategy.
His advice (coming from a man who in his fifties broke 3 hours SEVERAL times at Boston but perhaps most impressively ran 3:08 in 2012 - the 87 degree year!):
The best way to run the course is a slightly negative split. Run with an abbreviated stride with lighter, faster footfalls for the first several miles. SAVE YOUR QUADS FROM POUNDING. You should definitely feel like you are purposely holding back, and he recommends trying to average about :02-:03/mi overall SLOWER than your overall goal race pace for the first 10 miles even though it is downhill. From 10-16 miles you should swing the other way, averaging about :02-03/mi FASTER than overall goal race pace, which should still feel like holding back especially when you pass those screaming Wellesley girls.
If you have gone out conservatively enough you will have power when you get to the Newton hills. You will still probably average slower than overall goal pace here depending on your strength as a hill runner. Just keep the appropriate effort, which means you should start to pass the runners who tried foolishly to bank time earlier.
Recover for the mile that you come off of the last of the Newton hills and reset your pace rhythm.
The last several miles of the course can be VERY fast if you didn’t beat up your quads in the beginning. There will be loads of fading runners to pass which feeds into your momentum. The crowds are really loud the last few miles as well. Any time that you sacrificed at the beginning of the race by holding back can be more than made up twofold here.
This is coming from a far more experienced Boston man than me - I only ran it once before also with Mrs. Stone in the heat of 2017.
She and I are going to employ this strategy.
Good luck to everyone with whatever strategy works best for you. Just make sure that you have a race plan, that you can adapt as needed on the fly, and that you execute your race plan to the best of your ability.