Four decades of running Boston: Larry Boies, Jr., MD.

In 1952, Harvard undergraduate Larry Boies, Jr. had a Soldier's Field locker next to one John Kelley, the running icon whose career spanned some eight decades. Kelley had already been marathoning for almost 20 years then, and though a well-known figure in Boston, the much younger Boies was unclear on exactly who the man was. "He would come from work. He obviously wasn't a student," he says. Marathoning was under Larry's radar back then. "I think I had watched it once. But I was a sprinter in college," he says. Still, once he realized 26.2 miles was Kelley's distance, Boies feels it made a lasting, if subconscious, impression. "I must have filed it away in my mind: 'This might be a good thing to do sometime.'" Thirty-nine consecutive Boston Marathons later, that turns out to have been an understatement.

Minneapolis-born Larry Boies, Jr., MD, has always been athletic. At Harvard, in addition to sprinting, he excelled on a rugby team that also included Ted Kennedy. He continued rugby throughout medical school at Columbia University, where he was selected Eastern All Star in 1958. Contrary to a burden on his courseload, Boies saw this extracurricular fitness as a source of stress relief.

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After completing his residency in otolaryngology back in Boston, where he played still more rugby, Boies returned once more to New York. In 1962, while practicing medicine at St. Albans U.S. Naval Hospital in Queens, he found himself in another athletic adventure. Boies began working out with the Navy's pentathlon team, eventually joining the New York Athletic Club to develop his fencing skills. He learned to ride and shoot, and trained hard at running and swimming. This was all, as Larry puts it, "for some reason or another," and is demonstrative of the adventurous spirit, desire to push himself, and love of sport that have sustained him for his entire life. The pentathlon served more or less as a brief detour on Larry's destiny with distance running, however, and in 1964, in possibly the best shape of his life, he ran his first road race in Westport, Connecticut. It was at this event that he met his longtime friend George Sheehan.

In the mid-1960s, after returning to his home state of Minnesota for private practice as an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist, Boies joined the Twin Cities Track Club. "I was the first guy over 30 in the club, to give you an idea of the running climate then," he says. Undeterred by this senior status, Larry ran his first Boston Marathon in 4:01. The year was 1966, and though he would remain in Minnesota from this point forward, he went on to finish 39 consecutive Boston Marathons--though, he's quick to point out, "not always officially. Thank God for AMAA [waiving qualifying times]." Not that this was always necessary. Boies' best Boston Marathon was in 3:05; in 1968 he competed in the U.S. Olympic Marathon trials.

Why run Boston all these years? Perhaps the spell that a first marathoning experience casts is not so easily broken. And in addition to his serendipitous interactions with John Kelley, Larry also cites his college years and Boston residency as reasons. Several years ago, he even discovered affiliations with Hopkinton in his lineage; it turns out early relatives settled in the town briefly. In any case, the joy this ENT man from Minnesota finds in running this seminal American marathon is apparent on his face in the dozens of finish line photos he has collected over the years.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1969, Boies served as Chief of Otolaryngology at St. Paul Ramsey Hospital, a teaching affiliate of the University of Minnesota, until he retired in 2003 as an associate professor. Larry also began serving in the U.S. Navy Reserves, a commitment he honored for 25 years, eventually retiring as a captain. Boies, who is a longtime AMAA member, has dabbled in a wide range of sports and fitness activities over the years. He's completed the American Birkebeiner four times. The event is America's largest cross country ski race. He's also taken numerous cycling trips with his wife, Isabel Feinstein, MD--an ENT specialist as well--to places as remote as India, Morocco and Vietnam.

There are numerous press clippings documenting Larry's athletic prowess; they range from the 1950s, at the dawn of his stellar rugby days, to well into the 1990s, when the Twin Cities doctor was garnering ample local media attention for his prodigious Boston Marathon streak. But the piece that is in many ways the most telling is a brief article in the Minneapolis Tribune from November, 1967, at a time when distance runners were still considered part of the lunatic fringe. Under the picture of a 36-year-old Boies standing with three other Twin Cities doctors in track suits, the caption reads: "FOUR MEN WITH A THEORY: RUNNING IS A BENEFICIAL EXERCISE." There is an almost Roswellian conspiracy tone to this irony-free pronouncement. It's as if these men were proposing the latest dubious fad diet or anti-wrinkle cream.

In 1972, a visit to the once infamous, now renowned Cooper Clinic in Texas further shaped what Boies had always intuitively known. It's hard to overstate the animosity many in the medical community felt at that time toward preventive medicine pioneer Kenneth Cooper, MD. "He was a charlatan among the physicians of Dallas," Boies says. "He was promoting exercise for everything that ails you." In the era of essentially advising cardiac patients to go and lie down for the rest of their lives, physicians were finally coming forward with wild predictions on how we would one day not only prevent but treat heart disease with exercise. "It was crazy," Larry says. "Of course, it turned out to be the case."

Boies was deeply impressed by what he saw down in Dallas. "If I hadn't been so committed to ENT by then, I would have probably ended up as one of the physicians at [Cooper's] clinic. I think he's made such great contributions to the health of society." AMAA membership, then, seemed like a natural fit--even an inevitability--for Boies.

As it happened, he met AMAA founder Ronald Lawrence, MD, at one of the first meetings in Las Vegas, which had been arranged to coincide with the inaugural Las Vegas Marathon. Larry joined the Las Vegas Track Club and became involved with AMAA almost immediately. The well-established connection between AMAA and Boston soon guaranteed that Lawrence and Boies would be seeing a lot of each other. "I feel proud of playing a small part in a most significant and sweeping movement in health care," he says.

A former masters swimmer, Boies still competes in triathlons, and also as a racewalker. "I haven't taken up cross country skiing again, which I'd love to do, but you can't do everything." Maybe so, but if Larry Boies, Jr., is any indication, you can certainly try. So what keeps this 73-year-old runner going? "It's really created a balance in my life. I feel better about myself through goal-setting and the accomplishments it gives you aside from the medical benefits," he says. And Boies swears by Joint Juice, which an orthopedic surgeon in San Francisco invented, and he describes as a very palatable drink with large amounts of glucosamine.

As he reflected on his readiness to participate in the next day's 2005 Boston Marathon, he admitted, "I'm going to do a fair amount of walking."

Larry, you've certainly earned the right.