Yesterday morning America's premier annual long-distance race, the Boston Marathon, resuming its April running after 2020's event was cancelled due to Covid-19 and last year's was moved to October. It started with wheelchair competition, and a little past 9:30 the professional men and women's races began following by a rolling start of the general field, beginning at 10...the spacing was done to keep the faster contestants from being bottled up by the slower. The 26.2-mile course goes roughly west to (slightly north of) east, beginning in the town of Hopkinton and going through Boston, ending at the Public Library near Boston Harbor. The race isn't open...there are qualifying thresholds to cross, depending on one's age and gender, and it's a fair assumption to make that I'm far from making the "cut"...I'm 65 and I would have needed to top a time of 4 hours 5 minutes. Since my best marathon time (during a training run) was only 4 hours 23 minutes back in 2011 when I was 54 and I haven't even covered that distance since that year, I doubt I will be running in it anytime soon (even if I were 100 I would need to better 4:50:00 to qualify). So although I haven't completely discounted running in a marathon again, Boston is purely for viewing. Even so, I haven't followed championship running since 1976 when the U.S.A. had stars like Frank Shorter, Marty Liquori and Steve Prefontaine...the first two being hometown heroes where I live. No, instead I like to watch the different runners and how they stride and carry themselves through the race, but also I enjoy the background geography with the streetside spectators cheering on the runners and the buildings and topography along the way. Of course, as is the case with other sports like tennis and golf, what the runners are doing doesn't seem all that hard when watching them on the television screen, but in reality I'd have to push just to keep up with them on a bicycle. I was able to see the winners finishing in each running race...the Ethiopian and Kenyan entrants dominated both the men and women's professional field with both races close to the end. Naturally, of course, the TV coverage pretty much ignored the thousands of participants behind them. The top runners for the men and women were Evans Chebet (2:06:51) and Peres Jepchirchir (2:21:01), both of Kenya. Top rollers were Daniel Romanchuk from the USA (1:26:58) and Manuela Schär from Switzerland (1:41:08)...
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