About 200 Mainers will be rolling from Hopkinton to Boston in the 115th Boston Marathon on Monday, and every one of them has a trail of stories behind. Here’s a bit of background on just a few of those athletes.
Laurie Nicholas and Mike Nixon of Gorham hadn’t considered running Boston and hadn’t tried to qualify, but then a special motivation came along: John Mixon of Ogunquit contacted the Maine Track Club to offer bibs to runners who would do Boston as a fundraiser for the Run for the Fallen, the August event that honors Maine military personnel who have given their lives since Sept. 11, 2001.
So, in late January, Nicholas and Nixon joined a dozen other people, mostly local, who are Boston-bound for the cause. Nixon, 58, hasn’t run a marathon since the bitter cold and rain of Casco Bay in 1985. Nicholas, 43, ran Boston last year and “is always kind of in running shape,” she said, but that’s a long way from being marathon-focused.
They’ll be starting, in the third wave at the back of the pack of about 27,000, with “a different mind-set,” said Nicholas, who directs a preschool in Westbrook. “It’s not about finish times. I’d like to run a decent time, but this is about running to honor someone.”
Run for the Fallen entrants are matched with a particular person and family with whom they are in contact; many will be at the race, both start and finish. Nicholas will wear a Nike-donated “Running in Memory of” shirt with the name and likeness, front and back, of Marine Pfc. Angel Rosa of South Portland, who died in combat in Iraq four years ago at age 21. Nixon’s shirt depicts Cpl. Blair William Emery of Lee, who was 24 when a roadside bomb exploded near his military police vehicle in Iraq.
So far the runners have raised more than $12,000, said Run for the Fallen organizer Mixon. You can donate or find out more at www.runforthefallenmaine.org or www.firstgiving.com. Mixon added he also has a few bibs remaining for the sold-out Marine Corps Marathon in October.
• People are generally thrilled just to be doing Boston, but Maureen Sproul of New Gloucester has an extra reason: “I’m injury free and very excited about that.”
Sproul, 55, has run 11 marathons and qualified for Boston a bunch of times over the years, beginning with a PR of 3:09 at the Pine Tree Marathon in Waterville in 1991. She attempted Boston the following spring but went out too hard and had to drop out at Mile 16. There she sat on a cot with a male Kenyan runner who had also dropped out, but the language barrier prevented any commiseration.
The other times Sproul qualified and registered, shin splints and compound fractures kept her from getting to the starting line, never mind the finish. These days, compression sleeves have helped keep her healthy, and she qualified in ’09 with a 3:32 at Marine Corps, finishing second of 507 women in her age group.
Sproul is also pysched that her niece, Emily Jenkins, will be in the field. A 2005 Gorham High graduate and now a graduate student at UConn, Jenkins qualified with a 3:39 at Nashville.
• All marathoners know what it is to feel like “complete junk,” but not all can fight through it to hit a goal. But that’s what Seth Hasty of Gardiner did at Maine last fall, fighting down cramps and persevering to a ticket-to-Hopkinton 3:10.
Hasty, a sales manager for Oakley, is just 20 months into a steadily improving running/marathoning career: 3:36 debut at Philly in ’09, followed by 3:14 at Sugarloaf last May.
He played offensive tackle at Gardiner High and Plymouth State — at 245 pounds. Now, at 6 feet, he’s back to his seventh-grade weight of 165.
Five-month-old son Abe may have made finding training time for 70-mile weeks a little trickier over the winter, but Hasty also thanks Abe for the motivation: Hasty gained some weight after college, but “when my wife (Brianne) and I talked about having a baby, I decided I was going to be a fit dad.”
A 1:24 at the New Bedford Half last month suggests a level of fitness that should hold up well at Boston.
SPEAKING OF mileage, Peter Lodge of Bangor finds his miles 150 short of the 750 total he would like for the year going into Boston, thanks to the snow and “an ill-timed flu” in February, but what the heck. Above all, he will be in Boston “to enjoy the experience” for his fourth Patriots Day run there.
Like Hasty, he has family to thank for getting him to the starting line, in his case wife Abra, who with her Kenyan-fast new Mac got Lodge signed up for Boston amidst the registration crush in October.
Lodge, 47, teaches at UMaine-Augusta’s Bangor campus and has run 16 marathons. His first was a highly respectable 3:14 in the same foul weather that bummed out Nixon at Casco Bay in 1985.
So Lodge adopted an eminently brilliant tactic — he gave up marathoning for 17 years. And then what happens?
A few years later, he runs a PR 3:05 at Maine, at age 46 running 11 minutes faster than he did at 20.
John Rolfe of Portland is a staff writer and a road runner. He can be reached at 791-6429 or at:
jrolfe@pressherald.com
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