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Boston Marathoners
| Article
# : |
18559 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,793 Words |
| Author
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Theodora Nelson
Theodora Nelson has written for the Boston Globe, San
Francisco Examiner, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, and THE
WORLD & I. |
"I'm scared. Shaky. I know I'm going to suffer. Almost every race I'm in, I dread, dread, dread it." Veteran marathon runner Ruth Anne Bortz runs her hands through her close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
It's mid-April in the rural town of Hopkinton, Massachusetts. More than nine thousand runners stretch bodies and limbs, massage muscles, and check their shoelaces for the hundredth time. Thousands of pairs of eyes probe the sky for weather clues, and thousands of pairs of ears strain for the sound of the starting gun. The apprehension and impatience is palpable.
The Boston Marathon is about to begin, as it has on or near every Patriot's Day for the past ninety-five years. Twenty-six miles and 385 yards later it will end in front of the Boston Public Library--a course that some will complete in just over two hours, and some not for six, or seven, or eight.
As Ruth Anne stands on the starting line of this year's marathon, she won't be dreading it alone. Dr. Walter M. Bortz II, her husband of thirty-six years, and their thirty-year-old son Walter IV (a cousin is Walter III), will be facing their own demons along with her.
The senior Walter began running twenty years ago, using the physical outlet as "grief release" when his father died. Before running became fashionable, Walter ran the Boston Marathon in Keds© sneakers and tennis shorts, to Ruth Anne's dismay. "She thought it was undignified for a gray-haired guy to be running around in his 'underpants,'" Walter laughs.
Ruth Anne began to look at running a bit differently after she and Walter traveled to mountainous Nepal to celebrate her forty-seventh birthday. "It was a very hard trip, trekking up to twenty-one thousand feet," Ruth Anne recalls. "When we came back, we were lean and mean, in the best shape in our lives. I didn't want to lose it, so I started running."
Enlisting a neighbor as a running buddy, Ruth Anne began running, working up to three miles a day, seven days a week until she was, as she puts it, "addicted." Extremely goal-oriented, Ruth Anne decided the natural next step was to train for a marathon. When she completed her first twenty-six-mile race, she ran breathlessly up to her husband. "I want each of our children to run a marathon," she blurted out. "I don't want them to wait until they're forty-seven to find out there's nothing--there isn't anything in this world--they can't
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