Holton's Jared Morris completes Boston Marathon

The five years of work that Holton resident Jared Morris had put into reaching one of his life goals paid off earlier this month when he crossed the finish line at the 125th-annual Boston Marathon.

“I didn’t have very high expecta­tions going in,” said Morris, who fin­ished the marathon in 2,286th place out of 15,374 competitors. “My goal was to just go in and kind of enjoy everything.”

Morris, a 2004 graduate of Holton High School and the son of Bruce and Kathy Morris, certainly enjoyed com­pleting the prestigious 26.2-mile race on Monday, Oct. 11 with a time of three hours, seven minutes and 42 seconds, a time he says he’s happy with.

But given the time and effort he’s put into training for the marathon, he’s not sure if he will run again any­time soon — although he’s not com­pletely writing off the idea.

“I don’t have any regrets. But I think it’s time to maybe hang up the marathon shoes for a bit,” he said.

Morris, who ran track and played football while at HHS, took up run­ning on a whim in the fall of 2015, after the idea of whether he could run two miles without stopping got the better of him. He ran the two miles, and that led to longer runs — five kilometers, 10 kilometers — and more training.

In the spring of 2016, Morris found himself talking to a man who’d recently participated in the Boston Marathon, and while he was­n’t immediately inspired to train for the next marathon, it did serve as a “springboard” into pushing himself to see how far he could go.

Over the next three years, he would finish his first 13-mile “half marathon,” and worked his way up to a full marathon in hopes of achieving a “BQ time,” necessary to enable him to qualify for participa­tion in the Boston Marathon. But physical limitations, various pains and the COVID-19 pandemic kept him from participating in the marathon.

With help from a running coach recommended by former schoolmate and Halflete Fitness owner Lindsey Heineken, Morris was able to get himself back up to speed — literally — and in April of this year, he ran in the Golden Driller Marathon in Tul­sa, Okla., where he achieved the “BQ time” he’d been looking for and signed up for this year’s Boston Marathon.

After finding out that he’d been accepted for this year’s race, Morris stepped up the training, participating in a half-marathon in May.

“There was just a lot of running in the Kansas heat,” he said, laughing, of his training.

The weekend before the marathon, he and wife Katie flew to Boston, al­though there was no time for sight-seeing.

“We made kind of a quick trip of it,” he said. “We walked around a lit­tle bit the day before the race, but ac­tually, it was more of a business trip.”

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