FARGO — The reason for running in the first place for Sarah Peterson Deutsch was a one-hour stress reliever from all the studying in graduate school. Whether she was good at it, or not, was not the point.
The thought of doing a marathon?
“It sounded awful to me,” she said.
Awful turned to surprise when, on her first try at 26.2 miles at the 2017 Twin Cities Marathon, she ran so well that she qualified for the Boston Marathon. Monday morning, the Fargo resident will be toeing the line at the Boston suburb of Hopkinton and begin navigating the most famous long-distance race in the world.
Deutsch ran the Twin Cities in 3 hours, 34 minutes, 3 seconds and beat the qualifying time for her age group by just less than six minutes.
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The genesis of the effort began when she joined a small running group in Fargo. At one point during marathon training, a fellow member — noticing how well Deutsch was able to keep pace — mentioned to her about the possibility of not only finishing the marathon but qualifying for Boston.
Deutsch dismissed the notion.
“I’m like, I’m not about goals,” she said. “I just want to finish.”
Until about halfway through the Twin Cities Marathon, anyway. That’s when the competitive gene kicked in.
“You spend all that time training and then you have this guilt of missing every Saturday breakfast with the family because you’re running,” said Deutsch, the mother of three children. “So you tell yourself to try your best. That’s what you tell your kids to do. It was pouring rain and I get halfway through it and I think to myself that I can do this. You don’t put all your time into it and not give it your all.”
She finished 204th out of 3,399 females and 38th in her 35-39 age group. On Saturday, she and her husband Dan, 9-year-old son Stuart and 8-year-old twin girls Sophie and Ellie, flew to Boston.
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Sarah, 39, works at the Center for Special Surgery in Fargo. She had to wait until this year’s race because the 2017 Twin Cities Marathon in the fall was past the 2018 Boston application deadline. That meant she had to retool her training and doing it this winter when conditions were worse than usual wasn’t easy. An ankle issue didn’t help matters, either.
“The roads were awful and the sidewalks were not clear,” she said. “When I run, I do it at 5 a.m. on the road and you’re hoping not to get hit by a car.”
Then again, conditions aren’t looking rosy for the Monday Boston Marathon. Rain appears likely with a high temperature in the low 60s.
“So maybe my training will serve me well and I’ll be prepared for it,” she said. “All you can do is cross train and I’ve cross-trained enough. I’ve put in the time, now it’s a matter whether my legs will do it.”
The fact she’s doing Boston by qualifying on her first-ever marathon is probably victory enough. That fact is uncommon in the sport, especially for a runner who didn’t have Boston as a goal.
“I never thought about my pace,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be that bad, but I also didn’t think I would be that competitive.”
