Patriots Day

Sunday morning we had planned to be running the Flying Pirate Half Marathon, but as I have said earlier in this blog we decided it would be better to wait until we have recovered from injuries and can run more competitive times.  I decided I needed to do a relatively long run instead and headed for the boardwalk, which was filled with other runners and plenty of walkers (many of them headed toward Duck Donuts, it seemed).  From there I went out to the Four Seasons point, then farther south, out to the ocean twice more, and finally out of Duck completely and into Southern Shores.

On the way back, I noticed thunderclouds gathering ominously on the horizon in what had been thus far a warm and sunny morning.  By the time I reached Scarborough Faire shopping center, I felt the first few drops of rain.  I decided to see what time the Island Bookstore opened tomorrow and was surprised to find it was open today.  "Oh, good," I said, poking in my head.  "You're open!  I need a new book for a rainy afternoon!"  It began to let up a little, and by the time I reached Marlin Drive - a satisfying ten miles - the sun was shining and my clothes were just a little wet.

That was not the case this morning in Boston, where temperatures were in the 30s and it was pouring rain, with a strong headwind, for the thousands of runners gathered together on Patriots Day for the 122nd running of the Boston Marathon.  I watched it all morning (on the TV that we never turn on here) as some of the expected favorites (Shalane Flanagan, Galen Rupp) did not do as well as expected, but others did.  The stars were all in the women's race, where in the worst conditions in memory six of the top eight finishers were Americans - what a seismic shift in distance running! - and the single most exceptional of them all was Desiree Linden, who authoritatively pulled away from everybody else in the pack and became the first American woman to win the race in 33 years, a feat as exceptional as Shalane Flanagan's win in New York in November.

In an act of pure sportsmanship, Desi had held back earlier in the race when Shalane had to take a bathroom break (very unusual in a marathoner and denoting problems she was having that resulted in a sixth place finish), helped her get back in the pack, and then finally seemed to make a decision to go for it, her first marathon win.  I have always admired Desi Linden, and in fact I well remember running this same race in 2011 (my only Boston marathon) where she lost by two seconds.  So her redemption was well-deserved.

The storms had vanished here overnight, and by the time we stopped watching the marathon the sun had come out and we sat out in the sun for awhile.  All afternoon, we thought about the other runners who were still out there in Boston, slogging through wind and rain, especially Brian Egler from our very own running club, a charity runner raising money for cancer research.  He had started in the last wave of runners at 11:30, and he did not finish until nearly 5:30 this afternoon.  For Desi and Shalane and the others, the battle was over in two-and-a-half hours, but Brian's lasted nearly six hours.  But as he often  says, "Running a marathon is hard (and surely this was his hardest one), but cancer is hard, too."

Now the evening is spread out against the sky (in a phrase I have stolen from T. S. Eliot), and we have walked out to the dune-top deck, wondering where all the cats have gone during last night's storm.  Aha!  There is one of them, sheltering under the deck:

We stood and watched the clouds floating over the ocean for awhile, and I was thinking of Brian.  I hope he is sheltering somewhere warm and dry now, celebrating with friends and family.

(And by the way, the book I returned to buy at the bookstore is an Ian Rankin mystery, and a good one to settle into for a day or two.)