Boston Marathon Weekend and Patriots’ Day. They seem like a good reason for a vacation day and to head south for an hour and a half for a few days, wouldn’t you say?

This weekend, I decided to celebrate the holiday with a couple of giveaways through my email newsletter. If you aren’t familiar with Patriot’s Day, it is a distinctly New England holiday, specifically for Maine and Massachusetts (which used to be the same state.) The holiday celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the Revolutionary War. Every year, the Boston Marathon is held on the 3^rd Monday of April and almost everybody in the area gets the day off from work and school and comes out to watch the race.

Because it isn’t as important a holiday outside of New England, I decided to limit my giveaways to prizes that are only really relevant to folks that live in this area.

The first prize was for a gift certificate to Loco Running, a local shoe manufacturer based in Newmarket, New Hampshire. This gift certificate is good for 50% off any pair of shoes from them. They are good folk, and do a lot to support running in the area.

There were 16 total entrants in the contest for the gift certificate.

The second giveaway was for a subscription to New England Runner, which is probably my favorite magazine. Every time an issue arrives in my mailbox I immediately flip through the entire magazine looking for pictures of folks I know, and then read it cover to cover within the next few days.

They do a really good job covering all of the major events in the greater New England/New York area, and have some good tip-based and athlete profile articles mixed in with the race results. I always get excited when one of my teammates is featured or is an Athlete of the Month.

There were twice as many people interested in winning the subscription to New England Runner.

If you have a similar local magazine in your area, I recommend you check out an issue or two and see if it is a magazine you want to support.

I had a little trouble getting the screen capture program to work at first, so ignore the little flub at the start of this video:

So congratulations to our two winners!

If you’d like to participate in future giveaways or receive running tips and marathon advice, then please subscribe to my running tips newsletter (I’m still giving away my report on the 3 components of an effective workout if you subscribe today!) Just enter your name and email address here to sign up for the newsletter: