RAPID CITY -Goals are a part of any athlete's success. Sometimes those goals change as athletes get a little older, but they're still there.

Rapid City's Jonathan Nygard wants to run in the Boston Marathon, possibly the most famous road race in the world. But first, he has to qualify.

"You can't just go to Boston and say, 'Hey, I'm going to run,'" Nygard, who is running in this weekend's Deadwood-Mickelson Trail marathon, said. "You have to have a qualifying time."

Nygard, who works in advertising production at the Rapid City Journal, played soccer for his entire adult life -26 years since beginning at the age of 6 -but the stress of the game on his lower body became a little too much, so he decided to concentrate solely on running.

After discovering a tear in the meniscus in his right knee last year, Nygard couldn't run for six months. He's slowly coming around to the idea that running is his best option for keeping in shape and satisfying the competitive urges that remain with a life-long athlete.

"I decided that I'm not going to play soccer anymore," Nygard said. "I'm getting old, and the injuries are harder to overcome. I played indoor (soccer) over the winter season and started running at the same time. That was just too much for the knee to handle."

Which means it can be kind of hard for even the laid-back Nygard to handle.

"I run by Sioux Park sometimes and I see them out there playing, (soccer) and sometimes I really wish I was out there playing," Nygard said. "But this is my new passion now."

Nygard follows a 16-week training regimen designed to get him running at peak performance -which he hopes will be a time of 3 hours and 15 minutes later this year, the qualifying time he needs to join the Boston Marathon field. Part of his training was running in the 10-kilometer Bolder Boulder run last week in Colorado and the full 26.2-mile Deadwood-Mickelson Trail marathon this weekend.

While the Deadwood-Mickelson Trail event is not a race conducive to running a low enough time to qualify for one of the world's most famous long-distance events, it is still a big part of Nygard's training.

"It's kind of peaceful," Nygard said. "There are a lot of people running, but it doesn't feel like it. I love the outdoors, so mixing the outdoors and a marathon into the same package is pretty nice."

Training for a marathon is more intensive than the training for any other running event, because serious competitors must run 50 miles or more per week to prepare. For an athlete with a full-time job and family, there can be complications.

"I try to run on my lunch break," Nygard, who runs between four and nine miles on those breaks, said.

"Sometimes, I try to do it in the morning before work, but that's pretty early. I save my long runs for the weekends."

Nygard and his son, 6-year-old Carson, get some bonding time on those weekends when Nygard uses the Rapid City bicycle path for training and Carson tags along on a bike or scooter with him.

"It's nice," Nygard said with a smile. "At least when he decides to keep up."

Nygard's training calls for plenty of rest after completion of today's Deadwood-Mickelson Trail Marathon.

"After you run a marathon, they say you should take a day off for every mile you ran," Nygard said.

"That's 26.2 miles, so you're supposed to take 26.2 days off. I'm just going to take all of June off from running and then hit it hard in July."

Nygard isn't sure that a month of sitting around will be possible.

"I'm probably going to have to go out on my bike some," he said. "I just don't know if I can sit around and be dormant for that long."

The joys of running for Nygard are evident in a short amount of time.

"It's kind of addicting," he said. "I find myself wanting to go run on days that I don't have to run. It's like I need to. I kind of get fidgety. It's kind of like a high. I need to go get my high and go run."

For somebody like that it doesn't come as a surprise that Nygard finds the running, fatigue and pain that go with it to be extremely worthwhile.

"I can pretty much sum it up like this," Nygard said. "I have run hundreds of miles. I have run in the morning, in the dark, in the snow, in the rain, in the wind, in the cold and in the heat. And it will all be worth it once I am standing at the starting line in Boston."

It's always good to have goals.