Steeped in Tradition: Everything You Thought You Knew, and More, About the Hills of Boston
by Marc Chalufour
2005 B.A.A. Boston Marathon Official Program
So you think you know the Boston Marathon course? Think again. For decades runners, writers and scientists have struggled to describe and define the famed route from Hopkinton to Boston. They’ve used numerous combinations of hyperbole, artistry, and math, each with varying degrees of success.
Boston Globe writer Jerry Nason is credited with the most famous description of the Boston course, having coined the “Heartbreak Hill” moniker in his recap of the 1936 race. The name was appropriate that year, as Johnny Kelley was helpless to answer Tarzan Brown’s surge on the now-famous hill—but haven’t Boston’s other inclines accounted for just as much heartache as Heartbreak since then? Or do the uphills get too much attention altogether? After all, there’s far more downhill on the course than up.
Either way, Nason’s colorful nickname for the final Newton hill is appropriate because much of what we thought we knew about Boston has proven to be false. How high are the hills? How steep? For years the correct answers to these questions eluded us. For over two decades, in fact, the Boston Globe included a faulty profile of the course in its pre-race coverage. The profile showed Hopkinton to be 220 feet above sea level, about even with the top of Heartbreak Hill. A Globe cartoonist often added to the reputation of the Newton Hills by penciling in cartoon runners crawling up Heartbreak, and tumbling down the other side. Not until 1989 was the graphic revised to show Hopkinton at a more realistic elevation of 490 feet.
While the legend of Heartbreak Hill has continued to grow for nearly 70 years, only within the last three decades have the early downhills on the course begun to gain the respect they deserve. The fact is that for years nobody knew exactly how big they, or any of the other hills along the Boston route, were. Today, though, armed with measurements made by Rick Levy in the early 1970s, and updated by Alan Jones in 1991, we now have a far greater understanding of the makeup of the Boston Marathon.
Levy utilized detailed topographical maps of the Boston route, and supplemented that data with measurements taken with an altimeter. His figures were radically different from the figures being used in the press at the time, yet only Runner’s World, in 1975, published them. Eventually the Boston Athletic Association adopted Levy’s figures, and to this day they use his mile-by-mile elevation measurements in their publications. Alan Jones, like Levy, also used topographical maps, measuring out the course in painstaking detail. The result, a set of 210 different elevation measurements, represents the most complete set of data we have on the Boston course to this day.
Over the years, the most common means of illustrating the contours of Boston’s course has been a profile of the route formed by the mile-by-mile elevations. This method, however, paints an incomplete picture. A close look at Alan Jones’s data shows that there’s hardly a flat section of road between Hopkinton and Boston. Much of it is nearly flat, to be sure—about 61 percent of the Boston course has a slope of less than 1 percent (most of that of the gradual-downhill variety)—but a whopping 22 percent descends at rate greater than 1 percent, and 17 percent climbs at a greater rate.
Another way to understand the Boston course is to consider that from start to finish, there is a net drop in elevation of 136 meters—a fact that suggests that the course is a fast one. But to define Boston by that number alone would be comparable to judging a classic book by its front and back covers when the pages in between tell the real story. The images that follow tell the story of the Boston Marathon like it’s never been told before—displaying the largest hills in all their glory, while also detailing the many smaller contours that make the Boston Marathon so unique.
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Hopkinton
Elevation (top): 141 meters (463 feet)
Elevation (bottom): 102 meters (335 feet)
Length: 775 meters (.48 miles)
Avg. Grade: 5.0%
Steepest Grade: 8.0%
You’ll never be higher on the Boston course than you are at the start, though you never would have known that if you relied on the popular perception of the 1970s and 1980s that Hopkinton was no higher than Heartbreak Hill.
Rick Levy was the first person to approach the marathon’s topography with a scholarly eye. A self-proclaimed “engineering type,” Levy had studied the profiles appearing in the newspaper, and he was immediately suspicious about their validity. “It was obvious that a lot of the information that was being published was bogus,” he says today. “Some misconceptions must’ve crept into the press years ago and kept being repeated and quoted.”
Using his topographical maps and altimeter, Levy generated a detailed course profile. The results were a huge departure from the accepted facts of the time—and the biggest variation was right in Hopkinton. According to Levy the start of the race was 490 feet above sea level, meaning that runners had to descend more than twice as far as previously believed before reaching the Charles River at Newton Lower Falls.
The starting line has moved since Levy made his measurements, and now the start is at 463 feet. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of the first few corrals, you’ll already be headed downhill when the gun sounds. Those in the rear corrals will actually have to run slightly uphill to reach the course’s apex. From there, it’s nearly all downhill for the next 16 miles, but the steepest section is the first 775 meters. By the time you reach one mile, the steepest hill will already be behind you.
Wellesley—Newton Lower Falls—Newton
Elevation (top): 51 meters (167 feet)
Elevation (bottom): 15 meters (49 feet)
Length: 951 meters (.59 miles)
Avg. Grade: 3.8%
Steepest Grade: 5.6%
Elevation (bottom): 15 meters (49 feet)
Elevation (top): 39 meters (128 feet)
Length: 950 meters (.63 miles)
Avg. Grade: 2.5%
Steepest Grade: 6.0%
It’s hard to believe that so many years went by before the severity of the early downhills on the Boston course were truly understood. But according to Denis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, “We trust [a map] in a kind of insane way. We open ourselves to its pronouncements as though they were in fact the world, instead of being something somebody is saying about the world.” Even good maps are as much art as science. “We’re taking a reality [and] we’re shrinking it way down to something we can put in our hands,” says Wood. “There isn’t any map that isn’t violently distorted with respect to reality.”
Even an accurate profile of the Boston course tends to give readers an exaggerated version of reality—after all, one axis represents 26.2 miles of pavement, while the other axis tops off at about 500 feet of elevation. Hardly a 1-to-1 ratio. And with a course with as many contours as Boston, a profile that gives mile-by-mile elevations omits dozens of smaller, but still significant, ups and downs. One of the few sections of the Boston course that can be easily seen on any course profile, though, is this roller-coaster section of road that leads out of Wellesley and into Newton.
The final step of your descent from Hopkinton is also your steepest significant drop since the start. You’ll be running down a 5-percent grade coming out of Wellesley until the course bottoms out at the 16-miler mark at Newton Lower Falls, where you’ll quickly start heading back up.
Everyone knows about the Newton hills—yet most people forget all about this one. After leaving Wellesley and crossing the Charles River, you’ll immediately begin your ascent through Newton. The road levels off briefly mid-hill, then steepens as you cross over Route 128. You’ll keep climbing past the highway as the grade gradually lessens. Enjoy the relative flat of the next half-mile, though, because it leads right into the better-known of the Newton Hills.
Newton
Elevation (bottom): 27 meters (89 feet)
Elevation (top): 48 meters (157 feet)
Length: 450 meters (.28 miles)
Avg. Grade: 4.7%
Steepest Grade: 6.0%
Elevation (bottom): 30 meters (98 feet)
Elevation (top): 48 meters (157 feet)
Length: 625 meters (.38 miles)
Avg. Grade: 2.9%
Steepest Grade: 5.1%
Elevation (bottom): 45 meters (148 feet)
Elevation (top): 72 meters (236 feet)
Length: 600 meters (.37 miles)
Avg. Grade: 4.5%
Steepest Grade: 4.8%
When people talk of the Boston hills, this is the trio they’re usually referring to—the three rises that begin when the course swings onto Commonwealth Avenue at the Newton fire house, and end at Boston College. But just as people often forget that there are four—not three—significant uphills in Newton, they also tend to forget that the hills leading into Heartbreak roll up and down.
“They make too much fuss of the hills,” Jock Semple scoffed to the Boston Globe’s Jackie MacMullan in 1984. “I remember one time the BAA asked me to take some of the Japanese runners around the course before the race, and after I drove them all the way through, they turned to their interpreter and asked in Japanese, ‘where’s the hills’?” In fact, the Newton hills are far from intimidating when viewed from a car. What you can only learn from running the race, though, is what they look like with 17 miles already on your legs.
Before you even see the first of the hills, though, you’ll be greeted by some of the loudest cheering on the course as you near the turn on to Commonwealth Avenue—and that adrenaline should help you up the hill that you’ll immediately have to tackle. Steeper than Heartbreak, this hill rises for about 500 meters at a grade that ranges from 4.7 to 6 percent.
The loudest cheers fade as you descend towards the base of the smallest of the four Newton Hills. Before you head back up, you can catch a glimpse of “Young at Heart,” a statue of Johnny Kelley—the man who’s heartbreak inspired the name of the final hill that you’ll face. This incline again takes you up at a 5 percent grade before slowing leveling off as you near the top, and draw closer to Heartbreak. While it may now feel like you’ve done nothing but climb since the fire house, the top of this peak is about even with that of the previous climb.
The hill that Boston is best known for is neither the longest nor steepest on the course—nor is it the easiest. Heartbreak starts rising shortly after you’ve crested the previous hill, and slowly gets steeper as you near Boston College. You’ll already have 20 miles on your legs as you head up this final incline, but once you reach the top the end will be in sight as the Boston skyline comes into view.
Newton—Brighton—Brookline
Elevation (top): 72 meters (236 feet)
Elevation (bottom): 48 meters (157 feet)
Length: 730 meters (.45 miles)
Avg. Grade: 3.3%
Steepest Grade: 4.0%
Even with the famed hills of Newton behind you, don’t expect the Boston course to level out. Once you crest Heartbreak Hill, it will have been 18 miles since you’ve been this high. Enjoy the view while you can, however, because you’re about to begin yet another long descent. You’ll head down at a 4-percent grade, and head down at that rate for about half a mile before the road begins to level off. Another downhill at 22 miles leads you into Cleveland Circle, where you’ll turn onto Beacon Street.
Even the “flat” sections of Boston seem to be going slightly up or down, and as you head down Beacon Street towards Kenmore Square, it will be primarily the latter. Whether or not that’s a good thing for a marathoner whose legs are dealing with over 22 miles worth of fatigue is a question that has been debated for years.
According to road-racing rules in the United States, a course “must not have a net decrease in elevation from start to finish exceeding 1 part per thousand (i.e., 1m per km).” This particular rule was the result of discussions at the 1989 meeting of The Athletic Congress’s Road Running Technical Committee, which hoped to standardize road race records.
Boston’s course loses nearly 70 meters in the final five miles alone. But then again, you should never judge a book by its cover—it’s the pages inside that really tell the story.
This story originally appeared in the 2005 B.A.A. Boston Marathon Official Program.
