They ran the Boston Marathon. Then did it again.
Covering the Boston Marathon is always a highlight. This year, seven runners with the Trail Animals Running Club in Massachusetts, in partnership with the Hong Kong-based shoe company Mount to Coast, took on the Boston Double. They began their journey shortly after 3 a.m. on Boylston Street, running the 26.2 mile course to Hopkinton. Then they toed the start line and did it again.
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Most people who take on the Boston Marathon find running the fabled 26.2-mile course from Hopkinton to Boylston Street is a big enough challenge for one day.
Then there are those who crave even more. On Monday, seven runners completed the journey . . . twice.
Members of the Trail Animals Running Club, a nonprofit grassroots trail running club based in Massachusetts, started at the finish line in Boston before the sun rose — when most to-be Marathoners were still fast asleep — and ran toward Hopkinton.
Later in the morning, they toed the start line to run the official race.
The 52.4-mile ultramarathon dubbed the “Boston Double” — also known as the “Double Boston” or the “Boston Yo Yo” — is a relatively little-known feat, but has been going on for at least three decades, said David Desnoyers, a 38-year-old endurance running coach from Nantucket who was part of the group on Monday.
“It’s a thing that happens in the ultra community,” he said. “This iteration had a lot of upswelling behind it.”
After the registration period for Boston closed last fall, one of the race directors for Trail Animals put some feelers out asking if anyone was interested in tackling the Boston Double.
A handful responded, Desoyners said, and the club partnered up with Mount to Coast, a Hong Kong-based company that specializes in making shoes for long-distance running that sponsored the runners.
Embarking on this undertaking requires intense training and mileage.
The first ultra-marathon 41-year-old Justin Hetherington ever did with Trail Animals was called the “Do Not Run Boston” in 2018, a 50-kilometer race that took place the day before the marathon.
From there, Hetherington said he fell in love with going the distance — and then some — partly because of the resilient by nature and “extraordinary” type of people who are attracted to the endurance sport. Although he had run Boston three times before, Hetherington said he had never heard of the “Boston Double” until last year.
In the month of January alone, he ran a little over 500 miles to prepare.
“People are testing themselves in ways they haven’t before,” he said. “Doing these things keeps us sane.”
The hardy group gathered on Boylston Street at 3 a.m., donning reflective gear and headlamps to help them see.
Most of the seven participants were meeting for the first time but said they quickly felt a sense of camaraderie about the grueling task ahead.
On the front of their shirts they wore their Boston bib; on the back, their “Double Boston” bib.
“You think to yourself, like, what are we doing? This is incredible,” Hetherington said.
After beating her personal best during the last four Boston Marathons, Kathryn Zioto, a 40-year-old psychiatrist who lives in Winchester, said she was eager to chase a new experience.
More than a dozen support runners accompanied the crew on the first leg, and a van stopped with aid stations along the way. They also swung by a few Dunkins so the group could fuel up on sugar.
The sun rose around mile 20 of the first leg, Zioto said.
“The energy really picked up,” she said.
Time seemed to fly by as they chatted and got to know each other, Desnoyers said. They made it to Hopkinton with a time of 4 hours, 15 minutes, where they took a couple hours to recover at an Airbnb rented by Mount to Coast.
Then they were back at it. The group mostly went their separate ways during the official race. Zioto ran with her husband. They soaked up the sun, the cool breeze, and the exuberant hollers of the crowd.
At mile 16, the couple passed their two young children and her mother, who was screaming “She’s doing Double Boston!” with pride at the top of her lungs.
By the time they got to mile 23, her husband, who does not run ultras, looked at her with pure wonder.
“I don’t know how you do this,” he said, Zioto recalled. “At that point, I was at mile 49.”
For her, it was more of a mental game on the way back to Boston.
“Am I only in Framingham?” she thought.
But she powered through, and the pair finished the race with a time of 3:25.
“This experience would be hard to beat because it was so perfect,” said Zioto, who has been running ultras for more than a decade. “But if you called me up in 48 hours or more, my answer would probably be yes.”
Hetherington said he found the back-to-back marathons harder on his body than he was expecting, but his push to keep going was buoyed by having teammate Brendan Morgan, 28, running alongside him.
At times when he wanted to walk or jog, Hetherington said, Morgan refused to let him.
They crossed the finish line with a time of 3:37, he said. At the end, he had logged nearly 90,000 steps.
Morgan, who works at a manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, said they motivated each other. He was struggling when he spotted Hetherington just ahead at mile 6 and quickened his pace to catch up.
“We found each other at the perfect time,” he said.
The crowds grew electric when they hit Newton Hills, Morgan said.
Morgan ran across the Keystone State last year, but this was his first time completing Boston. For six weeks in a row, he ran 80-plus miles to prepare. He does most of his runs at 2:30 a.m., so the early start was no problem.
Whenever he told others he was running the course twice, they looked at him with disbelief.
“It’s just a great collective group of people who love doing crazy things,” Morgan said. “It was honestly magical.”
A couple of the runners said they were nursing sore calves, but were otherwise riding the high of the day.
This was also the first time running Boston for Desnoyers, who began doing marathons and ultras about a decade ago. He has done a handful of world majors, he said, but nothing compares to the roaring crowds in Boston.
Desnoyers finished the race with a time of 3:25.
“I thought that this was a great way to celebrate being a runner from Massachusetts. Why not do it twice? The course is amazing, the community is amazing,” he said. “I can’t gush enough about how awesome today was.”