There’s only a scattering of people watching by the side of the road, and if they’re cheering, the sound is muted by my drenched headband.Īnd yet. My hands are numb, and my feet are beyond sodden. A fierce head‑wind batters my face, my chest, my quads. Rain is sluicing down in sheets, relentless. I’ve pictured myself strong, confident, and pulling away under a brilliant blue April sky to win one of the most prestigious marathons in the world. I’ve visualized this scene, taking the lead coming off Heartbreak Hill, thousands of times over the last decade.
It’s time to ratchet up the pace and inflict pain. If I can’t hear her footfalls on my heels by now, that means she’s vulnerable. Young Kenyan runner Gladys Chesir has been aggressive for most of this race. I hold my breath-not an advisable tactic at Mile 22- and I count. I brace for her to respond, to reappear in my peripheral vision. I’ve just dropped the only woman between me and the 2018 Boston Marathon finish line. (Courtesy of Dutton) Book excerpt: ‘Choosing to Run’ The cover of “Choosing to Run” by Des Linden. To have my name on the list of champions is incredible.” “It’s incredibly gratifying to feel that connection with the race and the community and be in that history book. Then winning, she added, “was a huge relief because I always felt it was something I could do.
“I went to Boston and I thought, not my year,” Linden says. That experience almost forced her to stop running, but she kept at it and her diligence paid off with the 2018 win. She tells stories we’ve never heard before in the book, especially the health scare she had with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism after the 2017 Boston Marathon.
It’s about the lessons she learned from her parents and coaches and herself during hard times over the years that helped her seize the opportunity that April day five years ago.
But the book is about much more than that. In her new memoir “ Choosing To Run,” she offers a mile-by-mile account of her historic victory. She kept coming back to Boston and won the race in 2018, in what was basically a monsoon. To see an American woman contending in the final miles when none had won the race since 1985 was newsworthy. I must admit Des Linden (then-Des Davila) wasn’t on my radar when she ran the Boston Marathon for the first time in 2007, but she sure was after finishing second by just two seconds four years later in 2011.
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