Finally, we’ve reached the final goal I’ve laid out for 2025, and I already have news about it:

I’ll get to that momentarily, but the picture is a big spoiler alert.

The Boston Athletic Association (BAA) - the organization that puts on the Boston Marathon - runs other races as well.

They have what they call the ‘Distance Medley’ - that consists of the 5k, which is in April, the 10k (June), and the half marathon (November).

You can run each of those races individually - I ran the half with my friend Kevin a couple of years ago. (Thank goodness he was there because I did not train enough for that one and I would have struggled through it even more if I was by myself.)

But if you run all three in the same season, you get a special medal (or way to combine the medals - I think last year there was some kind of magnet involved for all three individual medals), and for the half, which closes out the trio, you get a special bib and it’s kind of a cool accomplishment.

I first had my eye on doing this in 2022, but I saw that the 10k fell on my parents’ anniversary weekend and we were supposed to go to New York to celebrate their 50th. (That did not happen because they got COVID, for those of you writing the complete history of John Sucich.)

Then, with other races I was doing here and there, I just couldn’t swing the medley the past couple of years.

But this year I wanted to carve out the time in the calendar and make it happen.

I saved this goal for the last one to write about because yesterday was the day registration opened up, and the medley tends to sell out pretty quickly. So I didn’t want to get all excited about this goal and not be able to complete it.

Because the first part of this goal is to successfully register for the BAA Distance Medley, but that sounds less exciting.

Luckily, this goal can remain as is.

Registration allegedly opened at 10am on Tuesday, and I was nervous so I got all logged in around 9:50am, and when I did I saw that registration was already available. So that made me a lot less nervous.

I doubt I’ll be, like, bib 0001 - I’m sure other people are more on top of this and knew how the BAA handles things…but I sure am glad I wasn’t pushing 3,000. (Did I mention there are only 3,000 medley spots? That’s how it sells out.) (And I was nervous it would sell out in a matter of minutes. That did not happen. It’s a matter of hours - it was sold out by around 3pm.)

I’m especially excited for the 5k and the 10k - it’ll be fun to run the Boston streets at a faster clip than I am able to in the marathon setting…and I haven’t run those races before.

The half marathon is daunting - there are some big hills in that one. But I’ll be coming off Chicago by the time that rolls around, so I should be in much better shape than I was the last time I ran that race.

All in all, very exciting, and like I told you yesterday - I now 100% have my marathon and my half marathon all registered for 2025. Any additional halfs - like during training for Chicago, perhaps - would just be icing on the cake.

You’ll be hearing more about these races for sure as the year progresses.