Timothy Ritchie will run the Boston Marathon for the second time and hopes to finish strong this year

Tim Ritchie pulled out a baseball analogy when describing his success in past marathons. "I'm 2-3," Ritchie said on Friday. "I've had two good ones and three bad ones. I'd like to even the score and bat .500 Monday."

Ritchie, 30, of New Haven will run the Boston Marathon for the second time. His last time in Boston was one of the bad ones — it was his first marathon, he went out too hard and struggled in the last 10K.

But his last marathon was one of the good ones — in fact, it was the best. Ritchie won the U.S. national championship at the California International Marathon Dec. 3 in Sacramento in 2:11:56, a personal best by close to three minutes. Only Olympian Galen Rupp, who won the Chicago Marathon in 2:09, ran a faster time by an American in 2017.

Ritchie, who grew up in Worcester, went to Boston College, where he starred on the track and cross country teams. He was an assistant at BC for the track and cross country teams until the fall of 2016, when he left the job and moved to New Haven with his fiancee and started to concentrate on his running.

In Boston in 2013, he finished in 2:21. At the Olympic Trials in 2016, he finished in 2:22 and ran a similar time at New York City later that year.

"I would be good for 20 miles then collapse over the last 10K," he said. "You've got to learn from your mistakes — or even if there weren't mistakes, you always have to try to improve, in the training and the fueling.

"For CIM, the training was really consistent. Higher volume workouts were the key. We didn't really have these major long runs but we had a lot of kind of long runs at a good pace. Like 16-18 miles, maybe twice a week."

posted Thursday December 20th