Des Linden sets a reading quota for herself—four books per month—which is easy for her to hit when she’s in a big training block with lots of time to settle into a comfy armchair between runs.

But these days, the books are piling up for the noted bibliophile. There’s rarely any downtime between runs with three weeks to go until the Boston Marathon. The miles she spends in motion—totaling 110 to 115 per week—are often the easiest part of Linden’s day.

Such is the life of the defending Boston champion: She’s a woman in demand. Since the moment Linden, now 35, broke the tape last year—the first American woman to win in 33 years—her life has become exponentially more complicated, with cross-country travel for appearances, interviews, and advertising campaigns.

Recently she found herself in an Irish pub, standing atop a bar to film a commercial and thought to herself, How did I end up here?

“At those moments,” she said, “you’re like, ‘My god, I can’t believe I won that race.’”

A year later, everything about Boston 2018 still seems unreal. The weather was brutal, with torrential downpours, high winds, and temperatures in the 30s. Most of the elites—men and women alike—suffered in the conditions. They dropped out in droves, struggled with hypothermia, or ran PWs (personal worsts) in the marathon.

And then there was Linden, who hung back at the start, tried to help her American counterparts Shalane Flanagan and Molly Huddle, and ended up in third place heading up Heartbreak Hill. On the way down, the two runners ahead of her, Gladys Chesir of Kenya and Mamitu Daska of Ethiopia, were broken. Linden pushed into the lead and never looked back. She won in 2:39:54, the slowest winning time in 40 years. Her margin of victory was more than 4 minutes.


What does she do to top that? For Linden, it’s about racing. She’s not going to Boston this time just to collect another paycheck.

“I want to be competitive,” she said in an interview with Runner’s World. “I’ve been top five here a bunch. I would love to win again. But I’m also willing to stick my neck out a little more than ever before to race aggressively. And if it all goes sideways, that’s a possibility, too. I’m comfortable putting myself on the line and risking that. Which is different than the past.”

Linden is making her seventh appearance at the starting line on Patriots’ Day, and her results have been remarkably consistent. She debuted at Boston in 2007, finishing 18th in 2:44. She has finished second (2011), 10th (2014), fourth (2015), and fourth again (2017). Strike out her debut and her win in the wild weather, and her times at those other four Bostons fell in a narrow three-minute range, from 2:22:38 to 2:25:39.

But even after her victory, she wasn’t content. The safe thing would have been to train to run another 2:25 and come back to soak up the adulation of her legions of fans on a happy run down Boylston Street, no matter where that put her in the pack.

Linden is not doing that. She’s been training to mix it up at the front.

That started last June, when she left her longtime coaches, Kevin and Keith Hanson, and returned to working with Walt Drenth, who coached her during her collegiate career at Arizona State University. He’s never at her workouts, because he’s busy as the head coach now at Michigan State. Even if she wanted him there to hold the stopwatch, she rarely runs these days in the same place twice, given the demands on her schedule.

“There’s not an empty day on my calendar where I’m like, cool, I’m going to read a book. That doesn’t exist.”

“We’re on the phone at least once a week,” she said. “I’ll send him all my splits right after a workout. It’s either thumbs up, things look good, or let’s adjust here or there. It’s all pretty much adapt as we go. He has the long schedule, but it’s nothing set in stone. I know what I need. If I were 25, it might be different, but I think it’s fine. It’s a good partnership.”

On their phone calls, he asks a lot of questions, tough questions. Call it coaching by Socratic Method. Sometimes the answers he forces from her are hard for her to confront.

Did you really commit to that move in the race?

“It’s like, no, I wussed out. He’ll just make you answer that,” she said. Then they troubleshoot.

You said you didn’t respond well on the uphills. How can we fix that? Do you think we need to fix that? What are you doing to make sure that’s solved?

Her training has been slightly less total mileage than she’s done in the past but with longer workouts, often aimed to make her finish fast to mimic the late stages of a marathon when winners make strong moves. One example was 8 x 2K repeats on short rest. Another was 10–12 1K repeats, and she was supposed to finish off in faster than 3 minutes per kilometer. She didn’t quite make it—she got through 10 of them and hit 3:03—but she considered it a strong day.

Linden raced the NYC Half marathon on March 17, where she finished fifth in 1:11:22, the second American (behind Emma Bates). She was encouraged by the way she competed, hanging in with some top international talent, for at least the first 12 miles. Her last big effort before Boston will include a mix of “marathon pace, threshold pace, and then really fast turnover stuff and it’s all going to be kind of mixed into one workout, which I think really helps [racing],” she said. “In New York, that’s what the whole day was, and I feel like that’s why I felt so good about it.”

She’s not thinking a minute beyond the marathon in April 15, either. Fall marathon, Olympic Marathon Trials next February—she’s not committing. “I’m not really sure,” she said. “It’s one at a time, and we’ll see after that.”


The Books on Des Linden’s Nightstand
Linden’s most recent read
The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA
The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA
Now 35% Off
$11 at Amazon
Her favorite biography
Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
Now 22% Off
Her favorite memoir
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Now 39% Off
Her favorite fiction
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Now 28% Off
Her favorite sports book
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind
Thinking Body, Dancing Mind
Now 26% Off

As training for this marathon nears its end, Linden says she’s feeling great physically. Her main struggle is balancing her prerace appearances with getting enough rest. She’ll finish a run and realize she has five more commitments that day. “They just start weighing on you mentally,” she said. “There’s not an empty day on my calendar where I’m like, cool, I’m going to read a book. That doesn’t exist.”

On a recent trip to Boston, she helped raise the marathon banners on the street lights, faced more microphones, more cameras. She trained on the course, where people recognized her more than ever. She overheard the murmurs from people in their cars or on the sidewalks: Oh, that was Des!

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And when she’s out training, it hits her why those people are recognizing her. She is, after all, the reigning champion, a thought that makes her smile as she passes through the Massachusetts towns that set the stage for her greatest career moment so far. “I can’t believe this,” she thinks to herself, still a little incredulous a year later. “This is freaking insane.”

preview for Boston Marathon Course Preview (2019)
Lettermark
Sarah Lorge Butler

Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!