Emma Bates entered the Boston Marathon with a plan that fell through just over halfway through the race on Monday.

        Betts spent more than a year training with coach Joe Bosshard and Team Boss in Boulder, Colorado last year after COVID disrupted her routine. It was her first attempt in Boston and it gave her confidence. Five feels like a castle. But I did not expect that I would be in the lead after 25 kilometers.
        “That was not the plan at all,” she said. “My trainer told me not to do it. He really wanted me to focus on this group and let the best girls wrestle and then lash out.”
       Bosshard, who has been watching the Heartbreak Hill marathons for the past two years, was not surprised to see Bates leading the way.
        “I looked at my trainer and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I think we’ll accept it,’” she said. “For a long time it was really surreal.”
        “She just started there,” he said. – I mean, at this point, let’s go home.
        Betts led to the 35k mark before being chased by a team led by eventual winner Hellen Obiri. But Betts finished fifth with a time of 2:22:10, the best time in US women’s track and field.
        “I was still picking up the pace and I ended up in the lead, which was a bit of a surprise because I thought I was going to catch up,” she said. “I wanted to be in the top five myself, so it’s no surprise that I was able to reach the level I was at and run as much as before.
       Although it took some time for Betts to warm up in the cold and rainy weather, Betts made it to the finish line and ran the first 5K in 17 minutes and 48 seconds, securing her place in the top five.
        “I’ve always had a hard time with the best ladies because the pace changes so quickly,” Bates said. “So it looks like a fartlek. But I just believe that I can go with them at the same pace and I can get into the top five.
       ”So I really stayed and hoped I could win. But it was the last 2 miles where they cut the time to 5:00 and I couldn’t hang out with that group.”
        Of course, Boston’s back half is the area Betts is most familiar with. After joining the BAA High Performance Team in 2015, she moved to Boston. Bates says that of all the places she’s trained, from Boise to Boulder, the Boston vibe stands out.
        “There’s so much history here, loving Battle Road and driving Charles and even Newton Hills is a special thing,” she said. “So being able to come back here and hit a home run and run the back of a track that I used to run on was very, very cool.”
       She also benefits from a Boulder workout that Team Boss replicated to mimic the hills of Boston.
        “In Boulder, if you go east to west, you always go up the hills,” Bosshard said. “So we were able to do a couple of 24 mile courses where we went uphill 900 feet and I think we were really just embarrassed to go down. I think we were at 1300 feet and in Boston – 1400 ft. That’s where we did all our training.”
        Among the men, Betts Team Boss teammate Scott Fauble finished seventh in the last four races in Boston (2:09:44) and was the top man in the US men’s class. In an ideal world, Fauble said, he’d like to be ahead, but patience is the best strategy.
        “I don’t want to be seen as patient,” he said. “But I can’t get out [as fast as the leader] in a marathon. So I have to make the right decisions for myself on race day.
       ”Today it was in the second batch, I was really trying to track down the last half. I thought I could put people to sleep and it took a lot longer than usual. I didn’t really start catching people until the last mile.”
       “Becoming the best runner not only in America, but also becoming the best runner at the Boston Marathon is something that will stay in my heart for a long time,” she said.