Dave McGillivray Made a Promise to His Grandfather Over 50 Years Ago. He’s Still Keeping It.

For most runners of the Boston Marathon, when they get to Chestnut Street in Newton there’s a sense of tentative relief. The famous hills are done. Just under five miles of downhill and flat running remains to the finish. For Dave McGillivray, though, that intersection is a stark reminder of the promise he made to his grandfather 53 years ago.

A year before, as a 17-year-old high school senior, McGillivray woke up Patriot’s Day and decided he was going to run the Boston Marathon. He hadn’t trained. He didn’t even have an entry – he was just a brash teenager who didn’t know any better and was going to take on the challenge and bandit the race. He called his grandfather, who lived near the course, and told him he was going to run. His grandfather told him he would wait for him at the 24 mile point to cheer him on.

At 19 miles of the race, though, McGillivray’s body shut down. He would end up in an ambulance and was taken to the hospital. He called his parents, who brought him home, and tried to call his grandfather. There was no answer. He tried again and again, but couldn’t get hold of him. Finally, at nine that night, his grandfather called.

“Where have you been,” McGillvray asked.

”Where have YOU been,” was the reply. “I’ve been waiting all day.”

“I said, ‘I quit. I failed,’” McGillivray recalls.

His grandfather’s response was swift: “You didn’t fail. You learned. You cannot go along in life setting reckless goals. You had no business being in that race, and you know it.”

His grandfather made him a deal. Train properly. Come back next year. He’d be waiting.

Two months later, his grandfather died.

McGillivray trained anyway — 120, 130 miles a week as a college freshman at Merrimack College, running himself into shape and running himself toward a promise. This time he officially registered. The day before the 1973 race, he came down sick. His parents told him he couldn’t run. He asked them for the one thing, he told them, that very few people had ever given him.

“A chance,” he said. “That’s all I want. Isn’t that all we ever want in life? A chance to accomplish something?”

They drove him to the start. He ran sick, suffering from the start. And, at mile 21 and a half, he went down again, that intersection in Newton. He sat on the curb with his head in his hands. Then he turned around and saw the Evergreen Cemetery.

“That’s where they buried my grandfather, and I could see his tombstone,” McGillivray remembers. “I said to myself, ‘That son of a gun said he’d be here, and maybe he’s not here physically, but he’s here spiritually.’ He kept his end of the deal.”

McGillivray picked himself up. He finished in four and a half hours.

“On that day in April, 1973, I said to myself, I’m gonna run this race every year for the rest of my life,” McGillivray recalls.

He has not missed a Boston since.

This April, McGillivray will run his 54th Boston. He is 72 years old. He has directed the race for 39 years. And for the first time, all three of his children — Max, 31, Elle, 21, and Luke, 19 — will be running alongside him.

The Journey From Runner to Race Director

In 1978, after a friend cycled across the country, McGillivray got it into his head that he wanted to do the same thing, but he wanted to run. He could see Fenway Park from his office (he was working for a consulting firm in Boston) and saw a sign in the park advertising for the Jimmy Fund.

“Help make a dream come true,” the message read.

He did a deal with the Boston Red Sox baseball team and the Jimmy Fund (which supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) to raise money through his run. He did a ceremonial start during a Red Sox/ Seattle Mariners game in Washington, then flew to Medford, Oregon to start the run across the country to Medford, Massachusetts. It took 80 days, running 45 to 50 miles a day. There were no days off. The effort raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Jimmy Fund. He finished at Fenway Park in front of 32,000 people. Then, after having taken a three month leave of absence for the run, his boss fired him a few days later. As far as McGillivray is concerned, it was the best thing that ever happened to him.

“It made me realize that wasn’t the path I wanted,” he says simply. “I wanted to stay in the running world. Health, fitness, philanthropy.”

He opened a running store. He started putting on races to get people to come to the store. He discovered he liked producing events far more than fitting shoes, and from that instinct he built Dave McGillivray Sports Enterprises, which now puts on 30 to 35 events a year — road races, charity walks, and increasingly, major international sporting events. (The company will be involved in this summer’s FIFA World Cup.) When the pandemic wiped out nearly every contract he had signed for 2020, the Governor of Massachusetts called. He needed someone who knew how to move people. McGillivray was hired to manage mass vaccination sites at Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park, and elsewhere. His team helped vaccinate 1.5 million people.

“The pandemic almost brought us to our knees,” he says, “but the vaccination work saved the business — and then we helped bring the industry back.”

McGillivray’s relationship with the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) began in 1988, the year after a chaotic start after a number of wheelchair athletes went down on the steep hill at the start and many runners tripped over a rope that wasn’t removed properly before the gun. That prompted the BAA to create a technical coordinator position. McGillivray applied and got the job. Over the following decades, his title changed from technical coordinator to technical director to race director, a role he held officially from 2001. Today he serves as race course director, part advisor, part institutional memory for a staff that has grown considerably since his early days.

For 36 years, he ran Boston at night — getting the race started at dawn, sending off the wheelchairs, the handcycles, the pro fields, the waves of qualifiers, then hopping on a motor scooter to monitor the course, before heading back to the start after dark to run the 26.2 miles himself. Then, in 2024, his daughter Elle said she wanted to run. He couldn’t miss it. He ran with her in the daylight, surrounded by the 32,000 runners that now fill a course he once navigated alone late at night.

“When I last ran during the day there were only 9,000 runners,” he says. “All of a sudden I’m in the middle of the pack.”

Last year, his youngest son Luke ran his first Boston. This April, all three will be at the start line together. McGillivray plans to be out at the Hopkinton staging area by 4 am — same as always — to manage the operational logistics he has overseen for nearly four decades. Then, once the waves are rolling, he’ll slip into the back of Wave 2 and find his kids.

“I told them, run your own pace — don’t hang back with me if you don’t want to,” he says. “But I’ll run with them for a few miles. Maybe I’ll run most of the way with Elle. We’ll see.”

IRONMAN and Triathlon Race Directing

That lesson his grandfather taught him about preparation and commitment would also help McGillivray become one of the pioneers of triathlon racing. After reading about the IRONMAN World Championship in Sports Illustrated, he would commit himself to learning how to bike and swim before heading off to Oahu to compete in the 1980 race.

“That was the year David (Scott) won for the first time,” McGillivray remembers. “I finished 14th out of 180. All the characters were there – the Bob Babbitts of the world, and John Howard. We all became friends.”

McGillivray would go on to finish in Kona from 1983 to 1989.

“I did it eight times in the 1980s,” he says. “Then, in 2014, I got diagnosed with severe coronary artery disease. I needed something – a carrot … something to really train for. So I went back to Hawaii in 2014.”

Two years ago, when he turned 70, McGillivray returned to Kona for his 10th IRONMAN World Championship finish.

In addition to his own participation, McGillvray also turned his sights to putting on triathlon events through the 80s. He started putting on events around New England, and created the New England Triathlon Series. For a number of years he also put on the Bud Light Endurance Triathlon, a full-distance race, in Cape Cod. (In 1986 I competed at that race, finishing third behind Scott Molina and Mark Surprenant.)

McGillivray also put on the second ITU World Championship in Walt Disney World in Florida in 1990. There were other World Cup events and international events in Bermuda, St. Croix, St. Thomas – all told McGillivray directed roughly 150 events. Along the way he also worked as an agent for some of the sport’s biggest names including Scott, Molina and Erin Baker.

“I’ll Never Retire”

At 72, McGillivray shows no signs of slowing down. OK, while he does admit to stepping back “a little bit” from the day to day operations of Dave McGillivray Sports Enterprises, all that’s done is allow him to “focus on some of these other things I’ve been wanting to do for so many years.”

He has written three children’s books. He has delivered more than 1,400 motivational speeches. He runs a foundation — the Finish Strong Foundation — built around three pillars: fitness, education and literacy, and philanthropy.

“It’s just a matter of choosing what I really want to get involved with,” he says. “I’ll never retire. I’m just Dave. I just do my thing.”

And he certainly won’t stop running the Boston Marathon every year, either.

On the third Monday of April, Dave McGillivray will pass mile 21 on the Newton hills once again – possibly with one of his kids. He will look across the road at the Evergreen Cemetery, as he does every year, and he will give his grandfather a wave.

The old man kept his end of the deal on that day when a young, brash 17-year-old learned a life-long lesson. Every year since, Dave McGillivray has kept his promise, too.

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