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A lot of people keep bucket lists of things they want to do or accomplish. That’s particularly true for athletes.

Mark Cagle will get to cross one of those items off his running list when he participates in the Boston Marathon on April 21, the day after Easter. He’s an avid runner so the training that goes into running one of the mecca events in the world doesn’t deviate too much from what he does on a daily basis. Still, the chance to cross off one of the elite marathons in the world is something that has him pretty excited.

“It’s, it’s gonna be difficult, but I’m looking forward to it,” Cagle said. “And you know, the weather too in Boston, you, I mean, I think two years ago, it was 95 degrees. And I think there were over 5,000 people that dropped out. But there’s almost 34,000 in the race.

“I’m gonna high-five everybody standing on the side of the road. If it’s good weather, I’m gonna go for it. I want to be under what I qualified for in Wilmington because it’s a harder course. But if I can run better than I ran in Wilmington, I feel like that’s a really good accomplishment.”

He’s been a runner since he began the sport in sixth grade. He’s reached lots of goals along the way and run in some impressive events while coaching athletes in Martin County and now at Terra Ceia Christian School, where he serves as cross country and boys’ basketball coach.

The opportunity really picked up steam when he and his wife, Brandi, went to Boston for their first anniversary. Both are history majors and love learning about the past. While taking part in the Freedom Trail, the idea came up that not only would he walk part of the course, he’d run it for real, too.

“We’re both avid runners, obviously, and so we spent, you know, a week in Boston,” Cagle said. “We’re both history majors, so we love history. Did the Freedom Trail, you know, ate at some really cool places, met some really cool people.

“And, you know, we were at the site of the finish line where it’s painted across the road. And Brandi was like, ‘Why don’t you run the Boston Marathon?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I mean, I’ve run a qualifying time before. I’ve just never applied.’ And I said, ‘Hey, why not? Let’s do it.’ And so, kind of made a plan at that point that we were going to do that.

They decided to train for the Wilmington Marathon, a qualifier to the Boston Marathon. Cagle said he had to complete that race in three hours and 35 minutes. They made a trip out of it and qualified.

“And I was like, I know I can do that. So, trained for it. Ran Wilmington. She ran it as well. So, we had a nice little vacation there, too, in Wilmington. We stayed right at the start line, which was nice.

“We just walked right out of our hotel room right to, you know, right there at the start line, the Johnny Mercer Pier.

“And, you know, I ran a pretty good race. I got behind the 330 pacer and it was really congested and I couldn’t get around. And so, that slowed me up probably by, you know, two to three minutes, in my opinion. But I ran a 3:15:42, which was, you know, almost 20 minutes faster than qualifying.”

Cagle said he’s run marathons in Raleigh, Charlotte and San Antonio but others like Los Angeles, Tokyo and Sydney along with Chicago, New York and London remain on his list. So he’s excited to tackle the many challenges of the Boston Marathon, from the hills of Heartbreak Hill to the turn at Newton Fire Department, running past Harvard and Boston College.

“Boston is different because most marathons, you train for the distance,” Cagle said. “For Boston, you have to train for the course. And I’ve run ultra-marathons before, you know, 100 milers. And this has been the most brutal training I’ve done. It’s bad. It’s very bad.

“Just doing a lot of hill intervals, to get prepared for those hills. You know, tempo runs, mile repeats, you know, 22 plus, long runs.”