You’re at a picnic at a park, and so is another family nearby. Your uncle gets drunk and belligerent, wanders over to the other family, gets rude, starts taking food without asking.
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News
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Mike Ricci set the stage for his 2020 by running the New Year’s Day 5k in Gaithersburg. As it turns out, by mid-May, he’s been spending more time working with the Manna Food Center, the race beneficiary, than he has been running outside.
As communications director for Gov. Larry Hogan, Ricci’s been cut off from the leisurely runs out in the Old Line State while he manages the outreach for one of the country’s most active governors during the coronavirus pandemic, which ranges from state-wide communications down to relationship building to tackle consequences of the pandemic, including food insecurity.
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Ashley Donovan is used to starting off her ultramarathons with a low-key command. “Go” usually suffices. But the start of her latest 24-hour run was accompanied by sirens.
At 6:01 a.m. May 9, as she started on a day’s worth of solitary 0.2-mile loops around the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad building and parking lot, an ambulance rolled out on a call. That service, and her fundraising run, hammered home the 24-hour nature of emergency response and demonstrated why she was doing this. The secretary on BCCRS’ Board of Directors, Donovan, of Upper Northwest D.C., has been a volunteer EMT since 2015.
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As you may have noticed, we don’t have many races happening for a while.
For the rest of 2020, RunWashington’s rankings are going to change to the next best thing – Strava segments. Since we can’t all get together in one place and go shoulder-to-shoulder, the next best thing will be to compare performances on the same turf at the DMV Distance Derby.
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I’m a road guy.
I’ll get on trails pretty regularly, but I have the most fun when I can just run and not focus as much on where I am stepping or thinking about the last time I tripped and bruised my ribs. Once I realized just how many people were exploring narrow trails when they started getting out of the house more, the roads, particularly in residential neighborhoods became more and more my bread and butter.
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Ben Beach was actually happy for the reprieve.
The Bethesda man, who holds the record for most consecutive Boston Marathon finishes with 52, had every intention of running his 53rd, but with the race’s delay, he’s happy to sleep in on Patriots’ Day for the first time since he was in high school.
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A Walt Whitman runner is getting a bone marrow transplant, but will need help from blood and platlet transfusions.
Ben Lesser got a major boost in his fight acute myeloid leukemia when the National Marrow Donor Program yielded a partial match.
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Dan Frank hadn’t done the training he normally would have for an ultramarathon, and he didn’t have a route planned. There were some tough points during his run, which lasted nearly a day.
But the Columbia resident and Paint Branch High School math teacher had plenty to keep him going as he ran about 102 miles in a fundraiser for the Community Action Council of Howard County, which includes the Howard County Food Bank.
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When the Rock ‘n’ Roll D.C. Marathon, stripped of its permit in the face of D.C.’s state of emergency order, announced its postponement, it hit a lot of runners right as they were starting their tapers.
But not all were planning to wait for the Nov. 7 makeup date. They had a marathon on their calendars for March 28, and they were going to run a marathon on March 28.
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New stay-at-home orders in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. carve out exceptions for outdoor exercise, which includes running. I’m sure I’m not the only person breathing a sigh of relief.
It’s up to runners to be responsible with this. In the grand scheme of things, running in a group isn’t as likely as most social activities to promote transmission of the coronavirus, but considering the ground runners cover, it’s a high profile activity that I worry could easily be seen as nonessential. It’s low-hanging fruit. And frankly, you should be doing everything you can to limit your exposure to other people.