鱼园有约： 莱镇人文第十期 I Frank Gens Technology Futurist & Marathoner

Our lives can often lead us to surprising futures -sometimes in the opposite direction of what we had once imagined. Transforming from a biologist to a  technology futurist, and from "anti -runner" to a devoted marathon runner, Frank has created impossibilities in his life that he never predicted. With nearly 10 years marathon running experience, he realizes a truth in life: It is never too late to start something again at any age, to create, to experience, to transcend, to live life  to the fullest.

Frank grew up in the nearby Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, the place his maternal grandparents came to from Ireland as teenagers in 1897. He attended Boston Latin School, America’s oldest public secondary school, where he was taught how to think analytically and how to communicate - foundations of his later career as a technology futurist. Latin School also introduced him to computers and programming in eighth grade (which was unusual in 1967). He admits he was not very excited by programming at the time, although years later his early exposure to computers would prove to be very helpful as his career pivoted from biology to tech.

Frank jokes that at Latin School he also learned to really dislike running – a few times a year, the gym teachers would have students run just one mile; Frank says he always wound up near the back, with a cramp in his side, out of breath, and vowing to never run again if he didn’t have to!

In college, at Johns Hopkins University, Frank found himself drawn to ecology, the study of interconnected biological systems and communities. (In a funny coincidence, his first ecology textbook was written by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson – a man who 20 years later would be Frank’s backdoor neighbor in Lexington!) He continued his intended career path in biology into graduate school, where he studied marine biology/ecology at the University of the Pacific’s marine lab on the shores of Tomales Bay in Marin County, California. 

From Biologist to Tech Futurist

In 1980, Frank moved back to Boston from the San Francisco Bay area, where he’d completed his master’s degree in marine biology. He was ready to start a marine biology job with the Massachusetts state government when, by fortunate chance, he heard about a job opening in a company that did market forecasting for the computer industry. Personal computers had just recently emerged, and the tech world was starting to look like a very fun and exciting place to start a career. Thanks to his early experience with computers in school, he was able to convince the company they should hire him. He left biology behind and started what would be a 40-year career as a leading technology market forecaster.

Frank says he was lucky enough to have a job where he “was paid every day to learn about the fastest-moving and highest-impact industry in the world – information technology”. In his career, Frank was at the forefront of analyzing and predicting the impact of microprocessors, PCs, the Internet, cloud computing and – most recently – artificial intelligence on business and society. In his job as Chief Analyst at IDC, a leading global tech forecasting firm, he regularly advised the top executives of IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, AT&T, SAP, and many other tech giants about what would come next in the fast-moving market.

For the past 20 years, as IDC’s chief analyst, he authored the company’s widely read annual predictions about the future of information technology. Frank gave hundreds of speeches about the future of technology before hundreds of thousands of executives in nearly 40 countries (including China), across six continents. You can find many of those speeches on YouTube – including, he jokes, ones in which he made many amazingly accurate predictions, and some predictions he’d rather forget!

Despite Frank’s professional success in predicting the future, he says he never would have predicted that running would become a big part of his life or that he would become a devoted marathoner.

From “Anti-runner” to Marathoner

Frank started his transformation into a marathoner very slowly and simply. He and his wife Marcia moved to Lexington from Charlestown in 1991, but it was not until the mid-2000s – once his three sons were in middle school and high school – that he would occasionally run in some of Lexington’s many 5K community race events, usually to keep one of his children company. 

In 2011, Frank’s relationship with running really began to change.  Frank was encouraged by a work colleague to run the (13.1 mile) 2011 Boston Half Marathon, which he ran well – which prompted some of his Lexington friends who were avid marathoners to suggest he set his sights on running the 2013 Boston Marathon. 

That seemed like an impossible idea to him at the time: to run the Boston Marathon, a person must first run another marathon at a very fast pace (qualifying time). Many people spend years running other marathons trying to qualify for entry to the Boston marathon (something called a “BQ”), and quite a few never make it. 

But Frank’s friends Yuval Ramon and Warren Kerper insisted that they could train him to run fast enough at the 2012 Sugarloaf Marathon (in Maine) to qualify for Boston. The training took around five months – every week, meeting four or five mornings at 6:00am in front of Peet’s Coffee in Lexington center, running for a minimum of five miles. Every week, there would be a “long run”, which started around 10 miles but gradually got longer – by the last month of training, the long runs were 20 miles. Frank notes: “That sounds very difficult, but it’s amazing how far you can run when you’re building up your mileage gradually and when you’re running with a group of supportive friends. Marathon training became more than a fitness routine – it became a central part of my social life.” 

With the help of Warren, Yuval and a strong group of additional Lexington running friends, at age 57 Frank ran his first marathon – the 2012 Sugarloaf Marathon – fast enough to qualify for the 2013 Boston Marathon. Marathoning became his new passion. He continued to train 4-5 days per week with his Lexington running buddies, in 90+ degree heat in the summer and on winter days when the wind chill reached -10 degrees. You can typically see them after their run having a cup of coffee in front of Peet’s around 7:30 or later. 

With the companionship and guidance of his running group, Frank recently completed his 22nd marathon: an average of over two marathons each year. This October he will run his ninth consecutive Boston Marathon. Of his 22 marathons, he has “BQ’d” (run fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon) 21 times, and has finished in the top 13% in his age group on average. He ran his fastest marathon at age 61 in a time of 3:16, finishing 16th out of almost 1,000 runners in his age group at the Berlin Marathon, one of the world’s top global marathons.

Frank’s most memorable marathon was the first of his Boston Marathons, in 2013. “It started out as a day of great joy, achieving my dream of completing the famous race. It quickly became a day of sadness and turmoil, as two bombs exploded at the finish line about 40 minutes after I finished.

“But the 2014 Boston Marathon was by far my favorite marathon. One year after the bombings, 36,000 of us runners were cheered on - on a beautiful, sunny day - by over one million fans all along the 26.2 mile long race course (twice the usual number of spectators). The people of the greater Boston area came together that day to unite in memory of the bombing victims and to show the power of hope and love over fear. To complete the happiness, an American – a naturalized immigrant from Eritrea, Meb Keflezighi – won the men’s race, the first time an American man had won the Boston Marathon since 1983.”

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