Do You Have to Run Boston Marathon to Be a Real Bostonian?

Patricia from Newton hasn’t run a single training mile in her life. She’s also been standing at mile 20 with a lukewarm Dunkin’ and a handwritten sign reading “YOU’RE ALMOST THERE (YOU’RE NOT ALMOST THERE)” for eleven straight Marathon Mondays. So the question writes itself: what actually makes someone a Boston Marathon person?

Steve Calechman takes a real crack at that in “The Salty Cod,” his monthly column for Boston Magazine. He grew up literally at the top of Heartbreak Hill and still never once laced up for the race, which puts him in a position to say something useful: you don’t have to run it to belong to it.

Fair point. Running 26.2 miles is a serious undertaking that most sane people don’t want. You’ve got January training runs at 6 a.m., downhills that wreck your quads worse than the uphills, and the whole toenail situation, which Calechman doesn’t sugarcoat. Whole toenails. Gone. The physical cost of actually doing the Boston Marathon is legitimately brutal.

The crowds, though? They’re doing something real too.

Think about the people camped along Commonwealth Avenue or screaming their heads off through Wellesley for three and four hours straight. April in New England doesn’t negotiate. In 2026 there’s a decent shot it’s 38 degrees and wet before noon. These folks show up anyway, find your name on your shirt, and yell it at you like they’ve known you since grade school. That doesn’t happen without effort and a certain stubborn affection for the whole thing.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Jeff Brown, the race’s own psychologist and author of “The Runner’s Brain,” in Calechman’s column. We come back to what makes us feel good. That’s the whole mechanism. The Boston Athletic Association has been running this thing since 1897, and the sidewalks have been packed basically that entire time.

New England has always built its identity around doing the hard version of everything.

The guy who’s up shoveling at 5 a.m. The fisherman who won’t take the bridge. You know the type. And the marathon, with those Newton hills and the wall that hits somewhere around mile 20, fits that cultural DNA just about perfectly. So there’s something genuinely surprising in what Calechman’s arguing: that the suffering isn’t the admission ticket.

He watched the race from his front yard as a kid year after year, grew up eating pasta for carb-loading dinners he wasn’t actually running for, and has made complete peace with the fact that proximity to a thing doesn’t obligate you to attempt the hardest version of it. Not every kid raised near Logan becomes an air traffic controller.

What the column keeps pushing you back to is a broader idea about who a tradition actually belongs to. Patricia from Newton doesn’t own a running watch. She owns eleven years of Marathon Mondays, a good sign, and the patience to hold her spot at mile 20 in whatever weather April decides to throw at her.

That’s participation. Call it what it is.