Boston Marathon 2018 live: Runners battle a miserably cold, windy, rainy day

China’s Qixiang Zhou (left) leads a pack of runners (Steven Senne/Associated Press)

The field of nearly 30,000 runners in Monday’s Boston Marathon is battling rain, wind and cold — brutal conditions with runners going straight into a head wind.

Race officials announced that the temperature was 38 degrees at the 8:40 a.m. Eastern time start in Hopkinton, Mass., making this the coldest start in 30 years. The National Weather Service predicts that rain will be heavy by early afternoon, with winds of 25-40 mph coming out of the east and right into runners’ faces in the early going. Later in the day, there will crosswinds. The high temperature is predicted to be 49; as the elite men’s field took off at 10 a.m., the temperature was 40. By 11 a.m., it was pouring.

Thank you in advance to all the volunteers who will be braving this weather today ♥️ The Runners really appreciate your help #bostonmarathon
— Shalane Flanagan (@ShalaneFlanagan) April 16, 2018

That meant that runners were coping with a different kind of misery this year, after last year’s 80-degree temperatures. Runners may love temperatures in the 40s, but not when rain and a blustery wind is added. Just look at Galen Rupp, who finished second in the elite men’s field last year. He had a unique approach Monday to staying warm, bundling up like he was about to rob a bank.

“The cold, the wet and the rain — that’s the three worst things you can have, and you have that in one race,” Abdi Abdirahman, a four-time United States Olympian said (via the New York Times) on the eve of the race. “A lot of guys have been talking about it, trying to be the tough guy and say, ‘Oh, I’m not worried about it, I will just have to deal with it.’ But you know, we will find out how many people are still intact after 30K.”

Officials coped with the weather by giving runners two bibs, one for their outer garments or ponchos. Those bibs, though, have just the numbers on them. The bib with runners’ names are underneath a layer or two. (In case you were wondering why there were bibs with names and numbers.)

Gladys Chesir of Kenya was the leader in the women’s field at the 15K mark with a split of 56:15. The lead was changing hands frequently because (you may have heard this before) the brutal weather. Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia and Geoffrey Kirui of Kenya were leading the men’s pack after 10K with a time of 30:15. Rupp was a second behind after 10K.

This is the 122nd running of the marathon and it comes a day after the fifth anniversary of the 2013 bombings at the Boylston Street finish line. The race, long a measure of endurance, now marks milestones of remembrance and survival, the taking of one step followed by another over the years.

Shortly before 11 a.m., the first competitor crossed the finish line. Marcel Eric Hug of Switzerland won his fourth consecutive title in the men’s push rim wheelchair race in an unofficial time of 1:41:49, the slowest time in 31 years.

Flanagan made a pit stop as she ran the route, ducking into a port-a-potty.

The man who captured the explosions looks back

Five years later, Steve Silva recalled being at the finish line and shooting video of the explosions that was shared globally. “It wasn’t a bone-rattling explosion like you might imagine — more of a muffled thud with a large plume of smoke that ran straight up the mid-level buildings on that block of Boylston,” Silva writes.

“My first thought was that it might have been a fireworks celebration that perhaps went awry for the Hoyts’s finish. But 13 seconds later, the second explosion went off just over a block away. ‘We’ve had an attack,’ I said into the camera’s microphone.

“In a split-second, I went from sports video producer to accidental war correspondent.”