We would like to congratulate Thomas Lowe for his completion of the ***Boston Marathon|http://www.bostonmarathon.org/*** today! His net time was 4 hours, 8 minutes, 43 seconds, which was excellent considering the humidity, temperatures in the mid-80’s, and the grueling terrain of the 26.2 mile course.
Becky and I had a great time spectating. We got off at the end of the Green Line’s B branch, at the Boston College stop. From there we walked up Commonwealth Ave., to the top of Heartbreak Hill, and then part of the way down the hill. We walked back up to the top of the hill and hung around the “Top of the Hill” line, where all of the news media were parked. It was great fun to cheer on everyone as they reached the top of the last major hill on the course. One guy near us I dubbed “Mister Top-of-the-Hill,” after the creative cheers he came up with for most every runner who went past. For example, to the man with his jersey unzipped all the way down to the waist he called “Come on, Plunging Neckline!” Another runner had an “FBI” t-shirt on, and MTOTH called out “Come on, FBI! Al-Qaeda is just ahead of you!”
We did manage to make visual contact with Tom, after walking back closer to the BC T stop. We saw him just down the hill from the 21 mile marker, gave him some cheers, and got a reaction. Hopefully it helped to motivate him for the five miles he had left to go.
Due to the laboriously slow, error-ridden Green Line (the train we were on was actually “rebooted” once while we were waiting, and before they finally decided to take it out of service), we weren’t able to make it down to the Finish line before Tom arrived. But all in all, it was a very enjoyable experience, and I definitely think it would be fun to attend even if we didn’t know anyone participating.
Just for fun, there is an athlete result search form ***here|http://www.bostonmarathon.org/cfm_Public/2004/pg_RaceAdvanced2004.cfm***. You can type in a city and state, for example, to see if anyone from your home town was participating in the race, and see what their results were. Or you can search by name, age, citizenship, or even their exact ‘Bib Number’ if you have it. Nobody from Mount Vernon, Ohio was participating, but there were two participants from Townsend, Massachusetts. For Jenn, there was one runner from River Vale, NJ. For Michelle, there were 17 runners from Saskatchewan (one from Moose Jaw, which I think is near your seminary). Play along at home – see if you can find a long-lost friend who ran in the marathon!
One last thing – as I have previously mentioned, the digital camera is out of service at the moment. I’ll be sending it in to Canon for repairs, but today we used Becky’s standard 35mm camera to take photos. I hope to have those developed this week, and I should be able to have the photo lab digitize them for me so that they can go up in our online gallery.
