Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250087
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Trish Menkart, owner of Charlie's Restaurant in the New River Valley Mall, got back home in time to help son Daniel celebrate his seventh birthday two days after her run.
"I did what I set out to do. I ran it in 31/2 hours," she said.
Menkart began running seven years ago as a way to relieve stress, although she didn't have a marathon with nearly 10,000 others in mind at the time. She has been practicing for months, "just getting your body used to being on your feet for that long."
She shared a room with Rosemary Siegel of Blacksburg, who ran in nine previous marathons and will do it again in California's Big Sur Marathon in May. This was her first run in Boston.
Siegel began running 15 years ago to get back in shape after the birth of her son, Jason, now on the track team at Blacksburg Middle School. She hasn't stopped since then.
But it seemed that events were conspiring to stop her from running at Boston. First, her airplane out of Charlotte, N.C., lost pressure and she was bleeding from the ears before it returned to the airport. Airline employees wanted her to get checked at a hospital, but she refused, saying she had to run in a marathon.
When she got to Boston, some tasty New England oysters caused a dental problem that she had to get fixed. But she did, and made her run.
It was during her dental problem before the race that she got one of her biggest thrills, when an old man in the hotel lobby invited her to go on a five-mile tone-up run with him. She did, but didn't learn until later that the man was 87-year-old Johnny Kelley, who has run in 62 marathons and won those in 1935 and 1945. There is a statue of him along the course on what is called Heartbreak Hill.
There are so many runners, she said, that "you don't even get to the starting line for three minutes." Next year, for the centennial, there will be three times as many.
"The 100th is going to be huge," said Jill Riblett of Christiansburg, dietician at Pulaski Community Hospital, who tried to book a hotel room for next year and found them all taken.
Riblett finished the marathon in three hours and 26 minutes, 12 minutes faster than her time in her first marathon last year. Boston is the only one that requires its runners to qualify in some other marathon.
"And I qualified for next year," she said. "I wouldn't miss the 100th."
The marathon has a 900 telephone number where participants can get their statistics. For example, Riblett now knows that she finished in 3,512 position out of the 8,255 runners who completed the course. She was 252nd in her age group out of 1,311, and exactly 300th among the 1,852 female runners. She even learned that her pace per mile was seven minutes and 53 seconds.
Keith Neely of Christiansburg had a special reason for running in the Charlotte, N.C., marathon last year that qualified him for Boston. "I did it for my birthday," he said.
"I just have been running for a while, and I started running 10 miles every day," he said.
Neely spotted Tom Johnson of Christiansburg at an airport on the way to Boston, but never caught up with him to find out if he was running, too. As it turned out, Johnson was there to watch his son, Harley, a Christiansburg High School graduate, make his first Boston run.
All four runners reported getting support from people in Boston who lined the course, cheering each runner on and offering refreshment along the way. "In Boston, it was absolutely great," Neely said.
by CNB