Like every other day in New England this winter, it was bitterly cold in North Andover, Massachusetts, on February 8. Nate Jenkins spent the afternoon reheating and recovering from a run he had finished that morning, a workout that included a 10K at moderate tempo and a 10K at marathon pace. With a warm-up and cooldown, he had run 19 miles.

Then, at 4 p.m., Jenkins went out for 18 more.

“It was unpleasant and it was rough on the body,” Jenkins, 34, says. But it was exactly the workout he needed to prepare for his next race.

Jenkins is running the Boston Marathon on Monday. It’s his first race at the distance since 2009.



​

That effort, at the World Championships in Berlin, was unsuccessful. In the 10th mile of the race Jenkins lost coordination of his right leg. He struggled the final 16 miles and finished 62nd in 2:32:16, more than 17 minutes slower than his PR of 2:14:56, which he ran to place seventh place at the 2008 Olympic Trials (one spot ahead of Meb Keflezighi). He vowed not to run again until he figured out the problems with his leg.

Nearly six years later, his leg is almost fully healed thanks to surgery on a herniated disc in his back and a lot of physical therapy, but much has changed for Jenkins.

He’s no longer a full-time professional runner. Jenkins, who graduated from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2004, is a seventh grade math teacher at Haverhill Middle School in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His new gig isn’t keeping him from training for the marathon with loads of miles and hard work—even if the training isn’t as intense as the 131 miles per week he averaged over an 18-month period in 2004 and 2005.

“My weekly mileage hasn’t been that high,” Jenkins says. “I would guess it’s between 80 and 105.”

He fits the miles around his busy schedule. Each morning, he and his wife, Melissa Donais, a nurse practitioner who ran at Yale, wake at 5 a.m. and go for a four- to six-mile jog around North Andover with their dog, Uta, a Brittany named after three-time Boston champ Uta Pippig. Then he heads to school. The day moves quickly, Jenkins says, because of having to be on top of his game in front of 30 kids class after class. Some of his students know of his running success, but Jenkins says it’s not too big of a deal.

“To them it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “I’m Mr. Jenkins, their boring math teacher who thinks its fun and exciting and gives them a lot of homework.”

Once the school day ends, Jenkins runs errands and returns home, usually around 4 p.m. Donais doesn’t get home until later, so Jenkins plays with the dog and then heads out for a second run.

If it’s not an easy day, he’ll run a fartlek or a progression run for a workout. He saves his harder workouts for the weekend.

Case in point: The 37-mile day.

Jenkins does most of his training alone—or with his wife and Uta—but he and Ruben Sanca did their best to meet for workouts throughout the winter. Sanca, a 2:18 marathoner who ran 2:19:05 at Boston last year, has known Jenkins since 2005. Like Jenkins, Sanca, 28, has a full-time job, in his case working in student affairs at the University of Massachusetts.

“It’s been great,” Sanca says of training with Jenkins. “We meet up, we do the training, and then we’re gone. It’s efficient.”

Efficient even if it takes forever, such as when Sanca joined Jenkins on February 8 for that mega-mileage day.

The two runners met at 9 a.m., for a 3.2-mile warm-up. Then they ran 10K in 33:09. They rested for three minutes, then ran 10K in 31:29. They cooled down for 2.5 miles. It was a solid workout, but they weren’t finished.

At 4 p.m., they started again. This time they warmed up for 2.5 miles before running 10K in 33:20. They rested two minutes and went right into 10 1-kilometer repeats on the roads. Jenkins only made it through seven.

Completely exhausted from 37 miles of running, Sanca couldn’t finish the cooldown. Jenkins made it home and sent Donais and her parents out to search for Sanca. They found him on the steps of a church. Jenkins noted on his blog that he was supposed to go out to dinner with his in-laws that night, but couldn’t move. “I kind of ruined their night,” he wrote.

Jenkins is realistic in his goals for Boston.

“I feel like a sub-2:15 is possible,” he says, “but I feel like it’s unlikely.” The math teacher says there’s a 25 percent chance of that. There’s a 50 percent chance he runs between 2:15 and 2:18. And that leaves a 25 percent chance he runs slower than that, which he says will be a bad day.

He hopes for great weather and he hopes that his coordination issues won’t cause him too many problems.

But he’s also not that worried. Being a teacher puts a lot of things into perspective for Jenkins. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and is comfortable with his successes and failures.

“Regardless of what I do on April 20,” Jenkins says, “I’m gonna go to work.”

He’s ready to go to work in the Boston Marathon, too.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io