Medina man fulfills big goal in finishing Boston Marathon at a brisk pace

Provided photos: Jose Quiros of Medina crosses the finish line in Monday’s Boston Marathon in a time of 3:07.46, his fastest time in a marathon.

MEDINA – It was about a decade ago when Jose Quiros took up running. Initially he was looking to lose some weight. Quiros weighed about 200 pounds then.

He lost 50 pounds that first year of running in 2013, and has stuck with the sport since then. He is a regular in local 5k races. He won the Run for Wayne on April 2 in Albion, an event that is the Wayne Burlison Colon Cancer Awareness 5K.

Quiros, 45, was running 100 to 200 races from 2014 to 2016. He then started to think about a bigger ambition: the 26.2-mile marathon with an ultimate goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon and finishing that famous course.

On Monday, Quiros fulfilled that dream. He covered the distance in 3:07.46. That was well under the qualifying time for him to come back again next year.

His wife Marixell and their daughter Sabrina joined him for the weekend in Boston. The entire event couldn’t have gone better, including the sunny 54 degrees on race day.

“It was an experience I’ll never forget,” Quiros said this afternoon.

He shifted his focus to marathons during Covid. In 2020 many of the 5k races were cancelled, and then last year it shifted to staggered starts so all the runners weren’t in a big group at the beginning.

Quiros didn’t like that and turned to long distance. He set a goal for qualifying for Boston and met that with a 3:10.59 marathon in Syracuse last Oct. 17.

Jose Quiros finds his name among about 30,000 in a display for the wall of runners at the expo before the Boston Marathon.

At Boston, the atmosphere was electric with a huge crowd. Quiros had to remind himself many times not to start out too fast. He needed his legs to have juice for later in the race, when then infamous hills lead to heartbreak for many of the runners.

Quiros did the first half in 1:34 and beat that pace for the second half.

“Near the end my legs felt great,” he said. “I felt like I won the lottery.”

Quiros for many years worked for Modern Disposal. He worked about 60 hours a week with an hour commute. He recently took a job at Mizkan in Lyndonville, just a 5-minute drive. That has freed up more time for training and to be with his family.

He has new goals. He wants to run a 5k in the 18s. If he can do it that fast he thinks he could then lower his marathon time to under 3 hours.

“I think I could possibly break 3 hours at Boston,” he said. “But I know I will be back at Boston.”