Run to Win

Just like last week last year, most of what I wrote this week centered around the Boston Marathon. This week I described what happened as opposed to what was coming up.

• The website updated automatically as I ran with text alerts, notifying the site about my disappointing finishing time. I missed out on all of my goals, so while the race was a failure it was still well worth running.
• Getting home from the race was far more difficult than running the race. The Nor’Easter left a good portion of New England in a state of emergency. I couldn’t take the train home because the tracks had been ripped up, so I had to take a late bus back to Maine. When I got here, there was no power anywhere in the area except for the penitentiary and the local peeler bar. It took me 5 tries to find a way home where the road wasn’t blocked due to downed trees and power lines or due to flooding, and I only live a dozen or so miles from the train and bus station.
• I continued the April series on Mind Games by sharing a lesson that I learned during the marathon and that directly led to missing my goals during the race. You should never let fear overcome your common sense. I was afraid of the conditions that I might face rather than looking at the conditions that I was facing, and this led to overdressing and being way too warm for a majority of the marathon.
• I described my Boston Marathon experience in pretty good detail, breaking up each part of the experience into a separate article:
  1. The Athlete’s Village
  2. The Race (including a mile by mile breakdown with splits.)
  3. Post-Race
• In running news unrelated to Boston this week last year, over 5000 runners had issues with the heat during the London Marathon. (Conditions were much better this year, with finishing times amongst the leaders dropping by as much as 2 minutes.) Some shot putters saved a woman’s life during a track meet when they looked across the street and saw that her building was on fire. They had to talk her out of trying to stay in the building to find her cats and shared their warm up clothes with her since she wasn’t wearing anything other than her undergarments.
• This week two years ago, I got back to my animated exercise series by describing how to do a bridge. I later expanded on that by discussing the benefits of the bridge as an exercise. I recommended that you always run facing traffic, unless there are local laws to the contrary. I also continued the series on the New Rules of Lifting by discussing the twelfth and thirteenth rules.

Three students from Germantown and one from West Philadelphia saved a woman from a burning building yesterday afternoon after they saw smoke coming from the house during a track meet. They sprinted to the house and heard the woman inside.

Germantown team member Dwyne Hall says the teens heard a woman yelling for help when they got to the house and found her on the first floor, planning to go upstairs to find her kittens. He says three athletes from Germantown and one from West Philadelphia talked her out of it and guided her outside. Hall says the woman was wearing only undergarments, so one boy gave her his sweat pants and another his sweat shirt.

I am glad that the students were able to talk the woman into leaving the house, and that none of them got hurt.

(Source: ESPN.com)

Frank Fixaris died this morning when his house caught on fire, apparently due to him falling asleep with a cigarette on the couch.
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Yesterday morning, a fire broke out in the gym at Fryeburg Academy, reducing the building and everything in it to ash with a few melted steel beams. All of the school’s athletic uniforms and equipment were housed in the building. Fire marshalls have not yet determined the cause of the fire. The school’s administration will not cancel any of the athletic contests or other events that were scheduled to take place in the building or with supplies that were kept in the building, based on the immiediate generosity of the local and neighboring communities.
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