Remembering my time in Boston, 2005–2007.

Seeing the images of fellow runners in Boston ahead of the marathon on Monday, I thought I’d reminisce a little.

I feel sentimental: it’s hard to believe I haven’t been back in all these years.

Technically it wasn’t Boston. It was Cambridge, across the river from Boston.

In March 2005 I got accepted to Harvard Business School. I was a third-year analyst at Morgan Stanley, working in the bank’s Moscow office. The acceptance email arrived just a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday. It was bittersweet. Acceptance to Harvard bittersweet?! Well, yes. I applied to Harvard’s MBA program in a very casual way. I wasn’t sure I needed to interrupt my investment banking career which was going very well. But apply I did, and I got in. Our first son, Maxim, arrived a couple of weeks later. The idea of going back to being a student and missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and bonuses hurt me. But there was no going back. Who rejects Harvard Business School?

In July of 2005, I woke up one morning liberated from Blackberry, American Express, my salary, and various perks. I was no longer an active member of the glamorous world of investment banking. Freedom was painful; there were withdrawal symptoms. The MBA is not even two years, I thought, It’s only eighteen months.

But I was excited about going to America. I was returning to the country where my international journey had started a decade before. I spent a year in Enid, Oklahoma…