Beaufort County teacher runs the 2015 Boston Marathon

Published 11:56 am Friday, April 24, 2015

MARATHON FOTO | CONTRIBUTED RACE TO THE FINISH: Washington resident and P.S. Jones teacher Dawn Landen, 41, was the only person from Beaufort County to run in Monday’s Boston Marathon.

MARATHON FOTO | CONTRIBUTED
RACE TO THE FINISH: Washington resident and P.S. Jones teacher Dawn Landen, 41, was the only person from Beaufort County to run in Monday’s Boston Marathon.

BOSTON — Thousands lined the gated streets of Boston on Monday, seemingly unaffected by the light rain, overcast skies, chilly temperatures and windy conditions.

Driven by the crowd’s cheers, rain cascading off her black jacket, Dawn Landen rounded the final inner-city turn at mile 25 and picked up the pace. With the goal she set four years ago now in sight — the finish line — she used the road’s slight decline to power through the final mile of asphalt.

She crossed the finish line, completing distance running’s most coveted competition in three hours and 54 minutes.

“I was shooting for under four hours and I knew it would be a whole lot tougher than the race I ran to qualify, so my goal was to do it in four hours,” Landen said. “There aren’t a whole lot of hills in eastern North Carolina for me to train on, so that kind of made it difficult in the training aspect of it.”

A sixth grade language arts teacher at P.S. Jones Middle School, Landen, 41, was the only person from Beaufort County to run in this year’s Boston Marathon, a century-old race reserved for only the most seasoned distance runners in the country, one that was stricken by tragedy two years ago.

And while a jury deliberates whether or not Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the bomber, should receive the death sentence this week, the race went on, as it always does, with very little focus on the deadly events that occurred at the hands of an unhinged 21 year old.

“There were several people at the starting line where this was their fifth or sixth marathon,” Landen said. “Nobody really commented on the race from two years ago. I didn’t talk to any one who was right there where the bombs went off or anything like that, but you saw lots of signs are you ran. You met many different people who were running for charity.”

Landen’s journey to Boston began four years ago when she ran her first marathon, setting a goal to someday run the country’s most famous race. In March, she participated in the Tobacco Road Marthon in Cary, a Boston Marathon qualifier, where she finished in three hours and 41 minutes.

While a time of three hours and 45 minutes was originally good enough to qualify for the early-40s age group, due to the number of Boston Marathon contenders, the cutoff was dropped to three hours and 43 minutes, making Landen’s time just good enough to earn her a Boston bib, No. 20923.

“I went into (the Boston Marathon) wanting to have a good time and it was a nice day to run, even though it was a little chilly and rainy,” Landen said. “The course was what I expected it to be. There were thousands or runners, I think right around 30,000 started the race. Millions of spectators. There wasn’t a section along the whole course that didn’t have people cheering.”

Landen, who made the close to 12-hour drive with two fellow teachers, said the course was different than anything found in eastern North Carolina — suburban, two-lane country roads, but hilly, eventually giving way to aged city streets. Beginning outside the city of Boston, the first 10 miles is a downhill coast, while miles 11-22 features hills of varying inclines. After mile 22, the course drops off into the city.

“I think any long distance runner’s ultimate goal is to run the Boston Marathon,” Landen said. “Maybe in a few years I’d do it again. I think it would be neat to do it as a group, if there were a group of people in Beaufort County who could get together, qualify and run it. You need experience and there were several groups running together, pacing each other.”