Business teacher Chris McIsaac is departing to Boston on Friday morning to run in the Boston Marathon on April 15. His training runs have been long and frequent in preparation for the marathon.

     “I was running 80 miles a week up until spring break,” McIsaac said. Though his training schedule was thrown off when he took a family vacation to Mexico two weeks ago, he is getting back into gear now that spring break is over. His goal is to achieve a pace of 5:43 per mile at Boston.

     “A lot of my training runs have been logged at that [pace] to prepare my body for that,” McIsaac said. Aside from setting a pace for himself, McIsaac has also been mentally preparing for the sheer amount of miles he will be running on the big day.

     “I’m trying to study the course a little bit and learn where to push and where to back off,” McIsaac said. Fitting training runs into his weekday schedule has been challenging, what with all the business classes he teaches at Tigard. Most of the practice he gets on weekdays is with the track girls he coaches at Tualatin.

     “I [also] get a lot of quality miles in on the weekends with Dave Harkin,” McIsaac said. “He’s doing a lot of similar training so we do quite a bit of stuff together.” Harkin is a friend of McIsaac’s who is training to run in the London Marathon. The Friday before spring break, he and McIsaac ran 18 miles at 5 a.m. before going to work.

     “He’s been a huge support in that sense,” McIsaac said, referring to Harkin’s willingness to train with him even when the day had barely started.

     McIsaac’s wife, Jill McIsaac, and his friend, Tyler Dudley, will be accompanying him on the transcontinental flight. McIsaac met Dudley in his college track days.

     “He ran at Whitworth University and I ran at Linfield, so we used to be competitors against each other and now we do a lot of training and stuff together,” McIsaac said.

     Boston will be a completely new experience for McIsaac. “I’m so excited to check it out,” he said. Before the marathon, he will be attending a Red Sox game and checking out a few of the historic buildings.

     In the marathon itself, he acknowledges that he won’t get much TV time. “The main focus will probably be on the elites,” he said. “But I’ve heard it’s crazy in terms of sheer volume of the crowds.” McIsaac is excited to be a part of the 30,000 attendees, whether or not he gets into the spotlight.

    “Thinking about all the people who have run that course before me is something cool to think about,” McIsaac said. “Being in the footsteps of really awesome runners in the past… I think that will be cool to be a part of and witness and experience.”

     McIsaac will start running at 10:02 a.m. EDT (7:02 PDT) on the big day. For anyone interested in following his progress in the marathon online, McIsaac’s bib number is 876. Individual runners can be tracked on the Boston Marathon website or on the mobile app.