Danielle Drapeau Will Run Boston Marathon For Charity

Neither rain nor sleet nor all this winter’s snow has kept Danielle Drapeau from her appointed rounds.

No, she doesn’t deliver mail.

A full-time student in an MBA program at Simmons School of Management, Drapeau has been pounding the pavement preparing for the Boston Marathon.

Drapeau isn’t a rabid marathoner. She’s run some 5K races—three miles—with friends; a 10K Marine Corps marathon in October, 2010; a half-marathon when she was in college and, more recently, last month, in Arizona.

“Running gives me a sense of accomplishment and has been an important part of my life since 2006,” she wrote on her running resume. “It is my passion.”

But not necessarily marathoning.

She ran her first and only marathon so far in January, 2009, in a much different climate than here—in Florida, at Walt Disney World. A friend convinced her to run there.

“It was great,” the alumna of the , and , Class of 2002, said. “No pressure.” Runners even stopped during the race, she said, to have their pictures taken with Disney characters.

Then, through working at the Harvard Business School, she became involved with a group of people at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who run as Team Brigham in the Boston Marathon. She decided this past summer to run with them.

“I became close to administrators at the hospital,” she said, and met doctors “so dedicated to their field and good patient care. I was impressed by them. I found they had a marathon team.”

The team trains together twice a week.

On Tuesday evenings, they do about an hour of hill work in Boston. They run one hill repeatedly, upping the number of repeats as they train. Only one Tuesday training session has been cancelled because of weather, Drapeau noted.

On Saturdays, they focus on distance. Her first long run covered six miles; this past Saturday, she reached almost two-and-a-half times as far:  14.8 miles. The goal:  20 miles. The marathon will be 26.2 miles long. Saturday runs can take a good three hours, Drapeau said, based on the distance.

“Running is all mental,” according to Drapeau:  “90 percent mental and 10 percent mental.”

She also works out on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Drapeau began to run in college—Endicott, Class of ‘06—because, she said, her friends ran. At Simmons, she doesn’t know many fellow students who run, she said, but she has a group of runner friends.

In her first marathon, Drapeau injured herself. She completed the course. Finishing “makes you stronger,” she said. But she also said she promised herself that she’d never run another marathon.

Then came the opportunity to run Boston.

She’s also working out financially to run with the team. She has to raise about $4,000; she is 25 percent of the way there now, she said.  Not bad, she said, considering that she started to raise money in December and January, competing with the holidays and post-holiday bills. Drapeau has a team website, https://giving.brighamandwomens.org/drapeau, through which contributions may be made. Her fundraising deadline is May 19.

The money goes to the hospital community health programs, Drapeau said, health care for less-privileged Bostonians. One of the programs she particularly likes, she said, is the Job Success Program. Students shadow doctors and get interested in medicine, she explained. She also pointed to a program that provides wigs for women who are being treated for cancer.

The daughter of Ray and Melinda Drapeau—her dad is the current Ward 7 alderman—and older sister of Ashley, plans to run the Boston Marathon with a friend and a friend of a friend.

She has a “yoga mindset” about the marathon. She plans to “do her own thing.”

Her favorite non-Marathon running routes, according to her running resume, are a 5.73-mile loop from the Museum of Science to the BU Bridge and back along the Charles River; a 10-mile loop between the State House on Beacon Hill and Cleveland Circle, round trip; and any number of miles along the Fort Point Channel.

Drapeau doesn’t prefer to run in a crowd. But what makes running Boston good, she said, is having people cheering you on the entire 26 miles. “The whole city gets involved.”

She expects to be “very sore” after the marathon, but “less sore,” she hopes, than after her first 26.2-mile run.

Marathoners aren’t necessarily healthy, she said.

After the marathon, on April 18, she may hang up her running shoes. “I’ll probably take a break from running,” she said. But not sit still. She expects to do more yoga.