Flat Hills Road

I’ve promised a few times to post the text of the story I wrote for the Boston Marathon program. With the marathon over and all the programs distributed, here’s the text. (Note that I’ve started with the copy I submitted, and may have missed some of the edits made between submission and publication. Also note that the copy deadline, in early March, meant that some of the details here are obsolete; the discussion about the 2012 Trials has progressed since the time of writing.)

Headline: Red, white, & blueprint
Subhead: When it came to staging the Olympic Trials, Boston put on a clinic

In 2008, the organizers of the Boston Marathon added something to the weekend program they had never tried before: another marathon.

The day before 35,000 runners made their way from Hopkinton to Boston, 150 women lined up for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials–Women’s Marathon. The first three finishers would represent the US and run the Olympic Marathon in Beijing in August. The race started in front of the Hynes Convention Center and, after a short loop around Beacon Hill, ran four laps of a 10-km loop which crossed over the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (and featured long segments on Memorial Drive in Cambridge) before returning to Boston. The finish line was the same as that for the traditional Patriots’ Day event.

“I never anticipated what it would be like to come down Boylston Street,” says Blake Russell, “with the church bells ringing and the crowd yelling like thunder.” Russell, who is coached by longtime Boston-area coach Bob Sevene and lived in the area for years before following Sevene to California, finished third in 2:32:40 and went on to place 27th in 2:33:13 in Beijing.

“Everyone was trying to out-yell the person next to them,” says Deena Kastor of Mammoth Lakes, CA, who won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympic Marathon and won the 2008 Trials in 2:29:35.

“We put those women on a whole different stage,” says Dave McGillivray, race director for both marathons.
(more…)

The 2008 IAAF Yearbook, which I’ve mentioned before, has a section in which almost all the Olympic champions respond to a survey. Some of them are cute, some are silly, a few are even a little boring, but the one which really caught my eye, perhaps because of his recent heroics, was Steve Hooker.

One of the questions was, “What was the last thing you thought before your Olympic final?”

Hooker’s answer: “The Belgian 4×100m team looks pretty cute.”