Waldon Adams’ body went numb while the words poured from the physician’s mouth. As he sat aghast on a gurney in the emergency room at the Howard University Hospital, each word uttered by the doctor drove the invisible dagger deeper into his rapidly-beating heart.
I’ve done my best to compile the Boston results for D.C.-area runners, roughly Washington, D.C., Prince George’s and Montgomery County, Md. and in Virginia, Fairfax and Arlington counties, Alexandria, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park and parts of Loudoun and Prince William counties. Please comment if I have omitted you.
Riding high on his trip to the Virginia state track championships as a freshman, Thomas A. Edison’s Louis Colson got overconfident going into his second year of cross country.
Overconfident, but certainly not lazy.
Soccer player. Elaborate cupcake decorator. Sub-1:30 half marathon specialist. Engineer. U.S. Corporate Athletic Association track star. Mother of two. A 5:45 a.m. out-the-door multiple-days-a-week dedicated running club member.
This may sound like three or four or seven people, but really it’s just one local superstar who excels at balancing it all.
A lifelong soccer player, Katy Kunc didn’t start running competitively until her junior year of high school.
She intended to run to get in shape for soccer, but had a lot of fun running cross-country. One year later, the Lake Braddock senior just completed her second cross-country season. She recently competed in the Foot Locker Nationals at Balboa Park in San Diego finishing in 19th place with a time of 18:07.
You are at an expo; and after you say your size, a volunteer picks it out of a mini-mountain of them and hands it to you, after which you stuff it in your token plastic bag, or maybe you hold it out in front of you with two hands, size it up like a painting, then decide in seconds whether it’s a keeper, a rag, or ironic.
It could be short sleeve, long sleeve, cotton, “technical,” designed by a budding 10-year-old artist, or be pure retina-burning color. But that’s not the point.
Don’t feel sorry for Ben Beach.
Yes, his goal of a string of 45 consecutive Boston Marathon finishes seemed to end on a closed course just miles from the finish line last year, where two bombs rocked the city and the nation. And yes, a 46th consecutive finish would have made Beach, from Bethesda, the sole record holder for consecutive finishes, an achievement he had worked toward all of his adult life. He didn’t get to cross the finish line as planned and for two months, his streak’s fate was in limbo.
The George Washington Parkway Classic kicked off its 30th running with a shady 10k before a long, sunny stretch that didn’t slow winner Dereje Deme, whose 49:46 was the first sub-50 time in three years, or Claire Hallissey, who is in the middle of a farewell tour of D.C.’s races.
Though the temperature rose considerably in the latter stages of the race, both winners ran negative splits over the second half of the course, despite a considerable downhill in the first few miles as runners left Mount Vernon for Old Town Alexandria.
Of the Washington, D.C. area’s tens of thousands of runners, 865 have registered for the 2014 Boston Marathon. The list has been updated to reflect a more comprehensive search of local runners
[button-blue url=”http://www.runwashington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Boston-entrants-2014-revised.pdf” target=”_self” position=”left”] See this year’s local entrants [/button-blue]
If the conditions are right, competitive marathoner Scott Allen, 27, of Washington, D.C., has his eyes on a PR in Boston.
It’s an ambitious goal.