Marathon Monday

Yesterday was a good baseball day. The Yanks avoided a sweep behind a beautiful outing by Andy Pettitte (and the offense!), and the Twins won a tight one against the Indians, staging a 2-out rally in the 10th that was capped by a Justin Morneau walkoff single. I have been really impressed by Blackburn and Baker on Minnesota's staff; they're fun to watch and have been throwing pretty well. Oh, and Carlos Gomez? Clutch. His production may not yet rival Torii Hunter's, but his defense does.

(Is it against some unwritten rule of baseball for me to own any Twins attire?)

Today was an off day for both of my teams, so it allowed me to go watch the Boston Marathon without missing anything. Two noteworthy things happened across the river this afternoon:

> In Kenmore Square, some runners will pass by and slap the hands of those watching from the sidelines. Well, this one energetic guy running for the Boston Children's Hospital came through and reached out to everyone along the line...except for me. He was about to, and then he saw my hat, pointed, said "no", and kept going. Silly silly RSN. I hope you didn't finish the race :-).

> The second noteworthy occurrence is actually more like a noteworthy epic story. Tourgee and I went not just to see the race, but specifically to see if we could catch Kyle and Stacey going by (Mark eventually joined us). Sure enough, they did come through Kenmore, and after they gave us hugs etc. they continued on with their race. And what did we do? Why, we followed of course! We caught up with them again two blocks later, and then we decided to just meet them in the finish line. But here's the catch: the sidewalks of Boston during the Marathon are a lot harder to traverse than the streets of the race. So, thanks to Mark "Frogger" Thompson, the three of us jumped fences, weaved through crowds, darted back and forth through pillars, ran through the Prudential Center, and jumped from 10-ft ledges (Mark to guard: Can we jump from here? Guard to Mark: I mean, you can...but you probably shouldn't) in order to meet our colleagues at the finish. Like I said, it was epic. Unfortunately, we couldn't find Kyle or Stacey amongst the mob of exhausted marathoners and their friends and family, so after searching for a good 30 minutes (as Tourgee screamed "KYLE!" every few seconds), we began on our way back to Cambridge.

But there's a funny ending to this tale. Walking across the Harvard Bridge, we worked on our retellings of the story. Of course, this led to screaming "KYLE! STACEY!" a lot. After about the fifth round of this and being halfway across the bridge, we get a response from behind: "TOURGEE!" Kyle had somehow found us! What are the chances? Haha. Then we hastily (and dangerously) sprinted across the busy roadway to congratulate them, discuss the day, and so on. Mission accomplished!