After almost 30 months, the storied Boston marathon again returned to form on Monday Oct 11th as over twenty thousand runners took part in the event. Your own McKinney Running Club had its own “MRC Stories” of suffering and success in Beantown and once again all who came out of the experience have been transformed and matured as runners.
Doing the Double: Patty Bockenfeld
Patty Bockenfeld participated in her first Boston marathon as an ambassador for Squash Busters. Her charity addresses the needs of underserved youth to attain college through fitness, academics & leadership. With SquashBusters as her motivation and the Boston Athletic Association as her governing body, Patty set about to raise funds & run miles. Many in the MRC club were there to support Patty with her training and events and communications. “Such an amazing experience & fantastic marathon”, Patty posted after her finish. While the full course race was 26.2 miles on Monday, Patty also ran another full ‘virtual’ marathon on the prior Friday. “I just did continual North-South loops past the monuments and history of this famous town”, said Bockenfeld. “I kept my watch running, even on aid stops into my hotel room and finished in 5 hours and 53 minutes. It was not a hard run, but it was a lot of time on my feet and that would play a role in the difficulty of running on Monday.” Patty’s story was one of perseverance and she got in both marathons, over 50 miles in this iconic American town at the 125th running of the race from Hopkinton to Boston. Well done Patty!
MRC places top 10 in the Open division
For the veteran runner, Boston is a race within a race. Maybe it’s going for a Personal Record. Maybe it’s going for the fastest 10K split in the last 10K of the race. For Bob Newton, Keith Pierce, Karl Huchthausen and David Saukam, it was forming the MRC men’s team to race a ‘team competition’ while individually competing with the course and endeavoring to set their best time.
The BAA offers the team competition for running clubs all over the world to pit their runners against the best in the world. The format allows any number of runners to be on the team as long as they run for a club that is officially registered with Road Runners Club of America or USA Track and Field. While the team roster can be any length, only the top 3 finishers count toward the team score. Bob, Keith and Karl ran a combined time of 8 hours and 5 minutes to place MRC in the top 10. Wow! Congratulations guys!
What is even more remarkable is how honest and American is this result. All of these gentlemen live within four miles of our MRC home base of Market Street grocery store where we assemble on Saturdays to run as a group. The MRC community has encouraged and drawn out their talents and they put it on display on a world stage. The team was the top team for Texas and Bob Newton ran the top time for all Texans at 2 hours and 36 minutes. While this was a life-defining moment, you’ll find all these guys as humble, down-to-earth runners who will gladly give you running tips and go about this community where they live and work to simply make this area a better place to live for us and our children.
Bringing Boston to Stonebridge
Jay Northcut serves in public office in Melissa TX just a few miles north of our area. And for those of you who already know Jay, you know that he runs the town of McKinney too! On Saturday Oct 9th, Jay completed his virtual Boston Marathon on the roads of Stonebridge. To complete a marathon on the MRC loop is to take on an elevation profile that is equally hilly as Boston. Jay did the full 26.2 miles with meandering versions of the MRC loop and gained 860+ feet of elevation in the process. Well-done Jay!
You can find finishing times and performances for Bob, Keith, Karl, David and all Boston runners at https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/results
mckinneyrunningclub.org 