View of some of the 2008 Monument Avenue 10K field:
Well one more reason I had to do this race was to honor Tommy West. He was a local man who developed liver cancer in 2007. In fact, his cancer was discovered a couple of days before I learned about my sister’s breast cancer. Tommy died just before the race in 2008, leaving behind a wife and two little children. A bunch of his friends formed “Team Tommy” two years in a row to honor this fine man at the Monument Avenue 10K, and I signed up to be on his team. We wore bright orange shirts – hard to miss us – with “Team Tommy” on the front and “Boom, Boom, Boom” on the back. Apparently when Tommy was in a meeting at work and he needed to get things done, he would say “… and then we will just Boom, Boom, Boom”. I met him and his family the prior year at a team cookout, including his sister and mother. They all seemed like very fine people, and I can only imagine how hard a loss this was for them.
The race was a lot of fun, despite cool weather and rain that was fairly drenching at times. The weather reminded me of my first marathon, in Anchorage, Alaska in 2005. Despite not having trained a whole lot for this race, and only having done a very small amount of running, I ran about 4 miles of the 10K, and had my best ever time in a 10K of about one hour, nine minutes.
I hope that the sight of all of the orange shirts was of some comfort to Tommy’s family and good friends, of which he had many.
Here I am, coming down the stretch about a mile from the end, showing off my orange Team Tommy shirt and my white Team in Training hat, with my 3 highly coveted 26.2 pins in it:
If by some chance friends of Tommy West happen to view this post, I hope you will comment and add some things about Tommy.
No comments:
Post a Comment