The Boston Marathon

(stock photo)

Rosie Dispozishen laced and re-laced her sneaker as she edged closer to the starting line of the 53rd Boston Marathon. At this time, the departure point of this increasingly-famous race was not a very big berg ... only about 4,000 souls. However, on Patriots’ Day every Spring, it more than doubled in size as runners from around the world assemble there for this great grandmother of all long-distance races.

Rosie knew that she was in for a tough race. She had competed against all of her low-number rivals at least once before and fully realized that they had the tremendous edge ... they all had two legs. Not that one leg hadn’t served Rosie well in the past. She and her two-legged partner, Butch Dykstra, had won almost every three-legged race in the country. She also did extremely well in foot races as opposed to feet races. But two legs just always seemed to work out better in a marathon, and Rosie knew that her work was cut out for her. So she sidled up to the starting line by leaning on, and then elbowing out of the way anyone who showed her the slightest sympathy. By the time the gun sounded, a beaming Rosie was leaning on her crutches in the front row of runners, somewhat incongruous with her four-digit seeding number pinned to her chest.

The race was on! Rosie quickly dropped her crutches and bounced along on one leg for about a mile before she could go no further in that mode. Then she plopped to the ground and started rolling. Since all the other runners had, by this time, passed her by; this was not the hazard it otherwise might have been. Other than making her extremely dizzy, this method of propulsion was relatively untaxing for Rosie. She had progressed for about another half mile this way before she rolled onto her rump and, putting her arms behind her, began to crab walk. However, her vertigo was, by then, so advanced that she waddled around in circles for a full five minutes before she was back on the bee-line toward Boston (where the race winner was just then crossing the finish line).

So it went for Rosie, alternatively springing forward on one leg, then rotating her torso, and then crab walking. By night fall she had reached Framingham and had acquired a police escort lest she be run over in the dark during her supine or prone race phases. And by early the next morning, a scratched and bruised Rosie was bouncing her way through Wellesley, almost unnoticed by the college coeds on their way to class. Then, she delayed rush-hour traffic in Newton for about two hours as she tried to revolve her way up Heartbreak Hill ... but kept rolling back down. Finally, around eleven PM that night, almost 36 hours after she had crossed the starting line, a thoroughly battered and humbled Rosie finished her most grueling marathon. However, by then she had been noticed by the press and the public. She was said by many to have had more courage than even Amelia Earhart.

And so to honor her one-legged spunk, the small town at the start of this great race rechristened itself as “Hopkinton.”

© Copyright   George W. Potts