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Posts Tagged ‘running’

Run a Marathon While Knitting

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2015| 4 Comments »

I liked a recent story by Steve Annear at the Boston Globe. It was about a student who was planning to run the New York Marathon — while knitting — to raise money for medical research.

“At first,” writes Annear, “the idea of knitting a scarf while running the length of the New York City Marathon was merely a joke shared between Meredith Parmalee and her former employer, We Are Knitters.

“But as the Northeastern University senior continued to ponder the concept, she realized she could use the attention-grabbing feat to bring awareness to, and raise funds for, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. …

“ ‘It helps distract me from thinking about running . . . and my legs hurting and my arms hurting. It helps me keep my mind off of it.’

“Parmalee, 22, is being sponsored by We Are Knitters, where she did a co-op job for school, to run with the charity group Team in Training. … As she jaunts through New York Sunday, Parmalee will use a technique called ‘finger knitting,’ rather than two long needles, to weave a long scarf.

“To finger knit, Parmalee starts by making a slipknot around her index finger, and then loops the yarn around each of her three other fingers, skipping the thumb. She then brings the ‘yarn tail’ back around each finger, so there are two loops on each, and slips the second loop off each finger, starting with the index finger.

“She repeats the process, slowly binding the yarn together in tight knots. Making sure she threads the yarn correctly between each appendage requires a certain level of hand-eye coordination, but it also helps Parmalee keep a steady rhythm while she runs. …

“Parmalee said the plan is to have supporters at designated mile markers along the race route so that she can replenish her yarn supply.”

More about Parmalee at the Boston Globe, here. More about about We Are Knitters, here.

Photo: We Are Knitters
Meredith Parmalee plans to use a finger-knitting technique while making a scarf during the New York City Marathon.

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Cold, Wet, Great Marathon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 21, 2015| 4 Comments »

Hours in an icy rain madly cheering family and strangers along with four grandchildren under the age of five. Erik made his best time, coming in under three hours. John looked on the web and found that Erik’s sister was the fourth woman from Denmark to cross the finish line yesterday, and Erik’s cousin was the fourth woman from Sweden. Erik’s mother waved a makeshift Swedish flag, which bled onto everything in the rain but elicited delight from unknown Swedes who also were running in the Boston Marathon.

Mile 19 in Newton was our meeting place, next to the hot-dog vendor. Suzanne got stuck on the wrong side, but the police knew this would happen and had little cards already printed out to tell people how to drive to the other side. She got there in time.

The day was a grand accomplishment for all concerned, not excluding four cold, soggy, cheering children.

runners-042015-Newton

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Runners’ Miracles

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My friend Meg is a runner. She runs for the joy of running, and she runs to support worthy causes like research on liver disease. Several times a week, she rises early and runs with friends and a few homeless folks who have found running to be a step toward getting their lives in order.

Meg blogs about running, too. Here she talks about running “with a team of homeless men and women from Downtown Crossing’s Boston Rescue Mission.”

Here she tells how she learned about Back on My Feet after seeing the program’s T-shirts being worn in a race:

“Running, as a means of teaching work and life skills to residents of homeless shelters.  Using their attendance, attitude, dedication to morning runs to gain access to job training, housing assistance, and help paying for and attaining education.  Intriguing, indeed.  Especially since I’d not noticed a single homeless person in that crowd of runners.

“A lifelong runner myself, I could evidence upticks in productivity and personal satisfaction when I was most engaged in running.  Was it possible that what worked for me could work for the city’s most troubled?

“I filled out the online interest form.  A few weeks later, I got an email confirming an evening orientation session, where nearly a dozen gathered to learn about the program. Vic Acosta, Boston Chapter Program Director, filled me with hope, enthusiasm, and energy – from that moment, I knew that Back On My Feet would be my kind of group.

“A few days later, I set that early morning alarm for the first time.

“I met the team – residents and non-residents both – that morning.  We ran a few miles, and I went home to prepare for work, still not knowing which runners were the residents [of the homeless shelter].  Then, I began to really understand the power of Back On My Feet: on those early mornings, we weren’t residents or non-residents, we were teammates.”

Now can I tell you the rest of story as it was told to me?

One day Meg mentioned to one of the homeless guys that she planned to drive up to Lowell with friends for a race. He was interested. He asked if he could come along. He said he was from Lowell and had been estranged from his family for years because of troubles with the law and with substance abuse. He wondered tentatively, hopefully, whether anyone in his family might like to see him now that he had gotten clean.

Meg took him along, and he ran with her group. At the end of the race his family was there. Cheering.

Photo: http://www.backonmyfeet.org/

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Running Backwards

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Did you catch the National Public Radio story on backwards running? Who knew that there are actually competitions in backwards running? I thought it was something kids do, and only for a minute or two.

“Achim Aretz holds the Guinness World Record for running the half marathon, backward. But now, the 27-year-old German athlete says he’s tired of doing something almost no one else does and wants to head in a new direction. Reporter Caitlan Carroll caught up with him in Hanover, Germany.” Listen to the Interview.

What would Lewis Carroll do with this? I immediately thought of the Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass.

Wikipedia has the story: “The Red Queen’s race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll‘s Through the Looking-Glass and involves the Red Queen, a representation of a Queen in chess, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.

” ‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

” ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’ ”

Pretty much anything Lewis Carroll wrote has always made perfect sense to me.

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