BOSTON (AP) – As he lay in bed at in the middle of the night, fewer than six hours before the first wave was due to start the Boston Marathon, race director Dave McGillivray made a series of anxious phone calls to find out if the actual weather would match the dire forecasts he had been getting for almost a week.

“The decision at 4 a.m. was not to cancel it,” he said Tuesday, a day after the Boston Marathon dodged the worst of a nor’easter and started as scheduled for the 111th consecutive year.

“Everybody said we could never cancel it. Yes we could,” he said. “It just wasn’t enough.”

High winds and rain buffeted the Northeast over the weekend and sent race organizers scrambling to take care of more than 20,000 runners, along with the thousands of volunteers and officials who are needed to put on the world’s oldest annual marathon.

McGillivray would not say how close organizers came to calling off the race.

“Let’s just say: It was a possibility. But predictions and forecasts are just that. We needed to get down and touch it and feel it as best as we could,” he said. “I was worried. I truly was. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was afraid. We just didn’t want to see anybody hurt.”

Officials at the Boston Athletic Association feared widespread hypothermia could result from start-time temperatures forecast in the mid-30’s and winds expected to gust up to 55 mph and make it feel 10 degrees colder. They also worried about dangers like live power lines or trees falling onto the course.

Race officials had dozens of smaller concerns, too: whether runners seeking shelter would monopolize the portable bathrooms in Hopkinton; whether the water tables would blow over; whether the buses would be able to get everyone out to the start.

Another safety concern was whether marathon runners, a fairly hardy breed, would just decide to run anyway even if the race was canceled.

“I know the mentality of runners. I’m one of them,” McGillivray said. “We think we can run up mountains and leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

The association, working with state and local governments, began coming up with contingencies: making minor changes to the course to avoid flooding or downed tree limbs; delaying the start by up to a few hours; or canceling the event altogether. Because of the logistics, postponing to another day is not possible.

But even as they planned for the worst-case forecasts, the weather let up; it was 52 degrees with a moderate rain at the start, and though strong headwinds slowed the runners, they were not dangerous.

“Would we all be standing here doing attaboys if what had been predicted happened?” McGillivray asked. “I don’t know.”

So, what were the problems?

• Part of the town green, where runners traditionally wait in a tent for the start, was flooded. Runners were sheltered in Hopkinton schools instead.

• Some temporary bathrooms were blown over by the wind.

• A live power line fell across the street from the course in Ashland, and it was cleared less than an hour before the start.

• The start of the mobility-impaired race was delayed 2 minutes.

“One bus got lost for an hour, and all the athletes were psyched” because that was an hour they didn’t have to spend milling around Hopkinton keeping warm, McGillivray said.

Some runners showed up with plastic bags on their feet to keep their shoes dry until the start. Others came with pup tents to while away the time after they arrived in Hopkinton and until the start. Mostly, though, they were just patient while they waited and didn’t jump the gun on the start.

“That’s what saved us,” McGillivray said. “The runners saved themselves.”

Kenya’s Robert Cheruiyot couldn’t match the course record he set last year, but won for the third time, in 2 hours, 14 minutes, 13 seconds. Lidiya Grigoryeva took the women’s crown in 2:29:18 in her first Boston try.

Following them to the finish was a surprising 98.5 percent of the field: only 315 of the 20,348 people who started the race couldn’t finish. And, after planning for an onslaught of weather-related injuries and dropouts, the race’s medical staff had a normal day.

Boston Athletic Association president Tom Grilk turned to Shakespeare’s Henry V and references to D-Day when he talked about the teamwork that helped the race run smoothly. Although he praised the efforts of the staff, volunteers and runners, it was also luck that the peak of the storm came over the weekend instead of during the race.

“It should have been a disaster. Instead, it worked,” Grilk said. “It was a day to be there. And who would have predicted that?”