WEST HARTFORD - — These days, Meb Keflezighi is a soccer dad. He can eat ice cream five days before the Boston Marathon.
“Coffee,” he said when asked what flavor. “I have to have it in a cone. A waffle cone.”
Keflezighi, the 2004 Olympic silver medalist, New York and Boston Marathon champion who retired from competitive running in 2017, couldn’t do that for years when he was training for Boston. Now he spends his time working with his MEB Foundation, which promotes global youth health, education and fitness; doing motivational speaking and driving his three daughters to school and to and from soccer practice.
“Sometimes I’m referred to as ‘The Uber,’ ” he said, laughing.
He runs 35 miles a week at conversational pace, down from 135 at his peak. Thursday afternoon, he got a tour of the West Hartford reservoir with some local runners before he headed over to Fleet Feet, the running store in West Hartford, to run a half mile with kids and do a meet and greet and autograph session. Later he left for Boston where he is working with sponsors over the weekend before Monday’s marathon, the first time the race will be held in the spring since 2019.
Keflezighi, 46, lives in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and daughters in his retirement. In 2004 he became the first American to win a medal in the Olympic marathon since Frank Shorter won the silver in Montreal in 1976. Five years later he became the first American to win New York since 1982 and in 2014, the year after the Boston Marathon bombing, he won Boston, the first American to do so since 1983, which remains his career highlight.
He last ran Boston in 2018 for the Martin Richard Foundation, established in the name of the 8-year-old spectator who died in the bombing. That was the year it was extremely cold and rainy and several top marathoners dropped out. Keflezighi finished in just over three hours. He went on to run New York that year for a charity and hasn’t run a marathon since.
For a while, the four-time Olympian thought he had retired too early.
“I still had that in the back of my head,” he said. “Then it was like, ‘No don’t be like Michael Jordan, you want to go out on the top.’ And you know what? I’m OK with it. You have to come to accept it. Now I go to races, I just enjoy it. Before it was like my mind might want to do it but the body can’t do it.”
So now he’s an ambassador for the sport, a role four-time Boston and New York winner Bill Rodgers has had for many years, and indeed, the two are similar in their easy-going demeanor and how they bond with people. The line at Fleet Feet stretched out the door Thursday and Keflezighi accommodated everyone, with autographs and photos.
“I had a lot of interaction with Bill Rodgers and I wanted to be the next guy like him,” he said. “I still have his autograph when I met him in ‘99 or so. It’s in my scrapbook.
“I didn’t think running would take me there when I started but eventually, after I won the silver medal, I wanted to be part of the sport and community to help encourage and support others.”
