More than 25,000 people are running in the Boston Marathon, and one of them is Burlington’s own Matt Wooten.
Wearing bib No. 12388, 49-year-old Wooten is racing in the 126th Boston Marathon. Wooten discovered a love of running as a student at Boyd County High School in Ashland, Kentucky. He wasn’t on the cross country or track team. He was a baseball player.
“My coach had a conditioning program that he got from the cross country coach that involved us doing a lot of different running,” he said. “We would run 400s (meters) and 800s, which culminated in a mile. In order to make the varsity team, we had to run a 6-minute mile. So there was a lot of training that went into that.”
With more training, Wooten eventually got his mile time under 6 minutes, a feat he can still accomplish today.
“That 6-minute mile has always stuck in my head,” he said. “And here we are 31 years later and I can still do it. I wasn’t always able to do it over those 31 years, but I could when I graduated and I can now.”
Wooten has run recreationally ever since. He ran his first organized race, a 5K, about 20 years ago. An environmental program manager at Sanitation District No. 1 of Northern Kentucky, Wooten trained through the fall of 2011 and headed to Florida to run with a co-worker.
Twelve years later, he recorded a running time of 3 hours and 17 minutes, an hour faster than his first race. A typical training program includes increasingly long runs over successive weekends with shorter runs of 6-8 miles throughout the week. To train for the Boston Marathon, he ran around 50 miles per week. The long runs toward the end were between 17 and 20 miles.
“It’s like having a second job,” he said.
Wooten and his family left for Boston on Friday. His training is over, and in the marathon, it’s just him, the course and his thoughts.
“I’m actually not, at least yet, planning on ‘racing’ the Boston Marathon,” he said. “I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to run. I’m going to enjoy the crowd. I’m going to enjoy the scene. I enjoy running. A lot of people say you’re crazy, but I get a kick out of it. But I have this gut feeling that my competitive juices will get flowing and I might go out a little bit harder than I intend to.”
He said he’s looking forward to being tested by “Heartbreak Hill,” a steep half-mile incline about 20 miles into the race with a nasty reputation for breaking the spirit of runners from around the globe. “I’m looking forward to Heartbreak Hill because look where we train. Is it going to beat what the Pig does at Gilbert, going up? I doubt it. But maybe it’ll surprise me.”
Once he’s finished the race, collected his medal and eaten his cheeseburger, Wooten said he’s not sure what’ll be next.
“People have been asking me, ‘Are you done? Is this your last marathon?’ I honestly can’t answer that question,” he said. “I crossed the finish line twice and said I’m never going to do this again, and I’ve crossed two times and said when’s the next one?”
He said that while he does plan to dial the training back a bit, he won’t stop running. “It’s too much of a stress reliever for me,” he said. “Unless I get injured, but knock on wood … ” Aside from some plantar fasciitis early in his running career and some back spasms that once slowed him for a few weeks, Wooten has remained injury-free.
So how does a healthy, 49-year-old man challenge himself after the Boston Marathon? Wooten said he’s become interested in bikes lately and is considering maybe a duathlon (a race that consists of running 6.2 miles, biking 24.8 miles and then running 3.1 miles).
Two of his SD1 running buddies – Craig Frye and Jason Burlage – have both completed IRONMAN competitions, which consist of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run. Is that something he might consider next?
“No,” Wooten said. “That’s a hard no. And if you see Burlage, you can tell him I said hard no. That has never really crossed my mind other than to say, ‘Man, that’d be cool.’”
But isn’t that how these things always begin?
“Don’t start that,” Wooten said, laughing. “I’ll go home and tell my wife, ‘Alright, a guy challenged me at work. He doesn’t think I can do an IRONMAN.’”
Wooten will start the Boston Marathon at 10:30 a.m. Viewers can follow his progress with the official Boston Marathon app.