As the only person to have run each and every Grandma’s and Twin Cities Marathon, perhaps no one is more pleased than John Naslund that Minnesota's two biggest marathons are back as in-person races.
On Saturday, John will cross the Grandma’s Marathon start line in his former hometown of Two Harbors for his 45th-straight Grandma’s race. This fall, on the first Sunday of October he'll run from Minneapolis to St. Paul in the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon as he's done for four decades.
“It’s going to be different,” the Bloomington resident cautions, noting that Grandma’s COVID protocols will have runners starting their journeys to Canal Park at intervals on race day. “It’s not going to be the same. There won’t be the mosh pit of runners where you get swept along mile after mile after mile. It will be like a small town marathon with everyone spread out.”
But, he acknowledges, it will be an improvement over last year’s virtual marathons.
“I went up to Duluth and ran the course on the day,” John, a Twin Cities financial advisor, remembered. “We started at the finish, ran to the half-way point and came back. It was like a workout, not even a time-trail.”
For his virtual Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon, he fashioned a similar out-and-back route between the Kenwood neighborhood and Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis.
While he gave himself latitude to alter the traditional marathon routes for his 2020 pandemic runs – a bridge was out on the Grandma’s course making the traditional course un-runnable anyway -- he was firm about when he needed to do the runs.
“I figured I had to do it on the day to make it count,” he said.
As a runner who has run at least two marathons a year for the past 48 years, beginning with the 1974 Boston Marathon, running roughly 25 races annually and “training straight through,” John welcomes the return of in-person events and regular racing.
“I’m tired of the isolation,” he said. “That’s what I’ve missed. I’m ready to crank it back up again.”
Cranking it back up on Saturday means targeting a 4:20 finish time for the 71-year, who finished 5th overall at the inaugural Grandma’s Marathon in 1977. John’s strategy nowadays is to pair each minute of running with 10 seconds of walking, an adjustment that fits the current epoch of his running career.
“Every ten years that rolls by, you’ve got to reinvent it,” he stressed. “I try to stay in the moment.”
So, while John Naslund may do the same marathons every year, he hasn’t achieved his streak by doing it the same way every time, or by looking too far ahead, or by wondering "what if?"
Asked if he ever considered breaking either streak, the response was immediate.
“No. No. Never thought about it,” he said. “It’s never been a consideration to sit one out.”
Photo, of John Naslund from the 1970s, courtesy of Grandma's Marathon.
This article originally appeared in the TCM's weekly e-newsletter, The Connection, in 2021. Subscribe to the Connection here.