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Boston Globe
21-04-2025
- Sport
- Boston Globe
For Des Linden, running her final professional marathon in Boston ‘is indeed going out on top'
Half, or 12, of her marathons have been Boston, including her first in 2007 and what she says will be her last on Monday. It's a perfectly practical decision, ending her marathon career where it began and blossomed. In what read as a full-page thank you note to the city and the race in Monday's Globe, Linden announced that she was retiring from competitive marathoning. She plans to compete in trail running and ultra-marathons, but this phase of her career is complete. 'People say you should go out on top, and that's what I'm doing — because choosing to race my final professional marathon in Boston is indeed going out on top," she wrote. 'I hope you enjoy one last show. Thanks for all the years and all the cheers.' Advertisement Linden, who finished second by just two seconds in 2011 and whose resilience finally paying off seven years later, left the sentimental feelings on the printed page on Monday. There was not much time for nostalgia when there was one more race to run. 'I was all in on racing,' she said after finishing 17th overall and fifth among American women with a time of 2 hours, 26 minutes, 19 seconds. 'In fact, if I tried to do anything different I probably would have just been a puddle of tears. Advertisement 'The days leading in were emotional. I tend to just suffer alone. I spent a lot of time in my room with those emotions and tears.' Linden is from the other side of the country, more old Pac-10 than old Big East, but she loves this place and its storied race like a local who grew up dreaming of roaring down Boylston Street someday. And because she does, because she gets it, and because her success did not come easily, Boston loves her right back. Linden is one of those rare athletes who has built a connection with this city through an admirable and abundant mix of competitiveness and character, similar in some ways to Meb Keflezighi on the men's side. She has always shown love to the city (one of her dogs is named Boston) and she has shown up, whether it was making her debut here in a nor'easter in 2007, coming up seconds short of victory in '11, or running away from the field in '18 in that miserable near-monsoon. Linden was always up for going stride-for-stride with Mother Nature, a trait appreciated in a region where people spend a good part of the year enduring uncooperative conditions. Linden fell for Boston during her marathon debut in '07, when she finished 18th, running in the shadow of established Americans Deena Kastor, Shalane Flanagan, and Kara Goucher. 'It was an overwhelmingly positive experience,' Linden recalled. The 2011 race brought that endearing near-miss, when she led briefly with 250 meters to go before Kenya's Caroline Kilel outsprinted her to the finish. Advertisement Boston does love a redemption story or a good tale of resilience, and Linden's legend was secured with her runaway victory — she prevailed by more than four minutes — in the driving rain in 2018, making her the first American to win the women's open race since 1985. Newton, MA- 4/21/25- Desiree Linden of the United States runs Heartbreak Hill during the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff) Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff 'This is storybook stuff,' she said then. 'I got into the sport because of the Boston Marathon. I came out here in 2007 and they treated a nobody like I belonged. To win on this course and this race with that support is awesome.' Linden was at her best in 2018 in the spot where so many runners' hopes have stalled over the years. She made up 25 seconds on the leaders on Heartbreak Hill before taking the lead at Mile 21 in front of Boston College. Related : She acknowledged Monday that the memory of that career-changing pivot point in her '18 victory crossed her mind during this year's race, but not for sentimental reasons, of course. 'I thought about that a little bit,' she said. 'There are little points along the way [you remember], I think that's more from a strategic perspective, where it's like, 'This is a good place to regroup,' or 'I can lean into this hill.' ' When Linden crossed the finish line, a little less than nine minutes after Advertisement '[That was] really cool,' said Linden. 'I had those folks in front of me that paved the way. I looked up to them and they always made me feel like I belonged, made me feel like my dreams were valid, helped me along the way. So I always tried to do that for other folks in the sport, as well.' It was a fitting final scene for the former champ and honorary Bostonian for life. And for once, one of Linden's core memories here was accompanied by decent weather. Chad Finn can be reached at
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Sport
- Forbes
AI For Runners And Athletes: We're Making Excellent Progress
BOSTON, MA - APRIL 21: Meb Keflezighi of the United States celebrates after winning the 118th ... More Boston Marathon on April 21, 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by) In a recent panel conference on AI, three experts in the industry talked about breakthroughs in AI fitness wearables that will have enormous ramifications for runners and athletes. A number of really good insights came out of this talk – pieces of the context around engineering that show us why AI is so good at supporting people in their athletic efforts. I'm going to go over one fundamental idea from each of these contributors, to show three design aspects that are a huge part of how we're exploring AI use for athletics. This idea about AI actually has two components – one related to the places where we put large language models, and another revolving around the difference between our human languagesand the language that our vital signs 'speak' when they are measured in real time. Alexander Amini knows a lot about running - and tennis. But he's also involved in a company that's revolutionizing AI for our times. In describing how AI can work for athletes, Amini first said it's about 'enabling AI to live where the data lives.' He explained – early LLMs were put on the Internet, because edge devices didn't have the capacity to run them. Transformers were expensive and complex. Now, the new models mean we can install smart LLMs on edge devices, and that will bring the cost down, while helping athletes who are in places without Internet access. 'It unlocks a completely new dimension of how we think about interacting with AI,' he said. 'AI doesn't need to necessarily be something (where) you send all of your data up to a third partyprovider anymore. It now can be something that is deeply embedded with your life, at every stage of your day.' His other point was that by harness harnessing ourselves with these wearables, we're getting a robust set of data. It's far beyond what we get by talking. 'It really comes down to the way that we talk to AI,' he said. He also broke this down further. Here's my interpretation: essentially, language is a set of symbols that we use to send ideas back and forth. It's 'compressed,' in his words. It's not raw. By contrast, if you think about all of the data that your body is giving off every microsecond, that's a different medium to communicate in. If AI is getting all of that data and using it,instead of listening to you talk, it can tell a lot more about you as a person. 'The data that we generate from our bodies is impossible to be compressed through language,' Amini said. 'It is highly multi-dimensional, and it's highly expressive signals, right? And it's constant. The amount of data is vast, and in many cases, it's not really possible to transmit the full complexity of our fitness in real time to these systems. So that's why, when we talk about bringing AI to ourselves … that's what we unlock.' Another great take on this came from Emily Capodilupo, who has designed a tool called Whoop. She explained the humans are not good at diagnosing whether they are dehydrated or not. 'We're actually horrible judges of being dehydrated,' she said. 'Humans tend to not realize that we're becoming dehydrated. In general … your body knows a lot … but there are incredible safety use cases, if you have algorithms running on your wrist, that can help you understand that ratio between how hard your body is working, and your pace: if they start to diverge too quickly, that could be a sign that you're on track to … hit a wall, or that you're sort of suffering from dehydration.' This rings true to me as a runner: if you think about trying to self-diagnose as a human, it's really down to whether you feel thirsty, or hot, or you can tell by your skin that you're dehydrated. AI can tell down to a much more granular level what your body needs, and that's going to be an enormous advantage for any kind of athlete who's equipped with these tools. Jamie is another person who spoke that day. He has done a lot of research on his own body, through a process called digital twinning. A digital twin is simply a robust model of something in the real world. I often use the term 'doppelgänger' to talk about creating a system. That's a highly detailed simulation of something physical or outside of the digital world in the analog space. The digital twin provides that playground of analysis that helps us to advance our measurements. Jamie revealed that he has built 100 samples of himself, foraround $5000 each. 'I've spent a half a million dollars on my own biology in the last ten years measuring outcome changes,' he said. 'Those outcome changes add up into this digital twin that predicts my future, predicts all my disease risks, and we have blood tests now.' In terms of access, he quoted William Gibson: 'The future is here - it's just not evenly distributed.' 'We have blood tests now for essentially every human disease,' he continued, 'that are somewhere between five(fold) and tenfold more accurate than the current predictions in the market.' Going further, he explained that research in applying new technologies found that half of patients analyzed could benefit from a significant intervention based on collected data. 'In half of the people we've done these analysis on, we have found a life-changing piece of actionable information in them that is likely to add years to their life, and that's computed, predicted and analyzed,' he said. That's an amazing statistic. Each of these three revelations illustrates the immense power of AI to help us to 'fine-tune' our lives, for fitness, for longevity, etc. In so many ways, we don't have to guess anymore. Basically, a lot of what we previously considered science fiction is now real. Certain tools may or may not be on the market yet – we haven't seen all of this technology play out in our lives so far. But that's going to change soon.
Boston Globe
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
4 Boston Marathon beers to try right now
Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up Samuel Adams 26.2 Brew Advertisement The Boston Marathon's official beer is back for its 13th year. Brewed in collaboration with the Boston Athletic Association, the name 26.2 Brew refers to the mileage of the marathon. In the glass, the beer is a gose ale, a style native to Germany that's known for being both a little sour and a little salty. This light-bodied ale has hints of citrus and peppery spice, and is brewed with coriander. In 2019, the recipe for 26.2 Brew was tweaked with the help of marathoners Meb Keflezighi and Des Linden. The beer is available on draft and in cans at Samuel Adams' Faneuil Hall and Jamaica Plain taprooms, throughout race weekend at the Run Pub in City Hall Plaza, and key accounts in Greater Boston. Advertisement Boston Rising from Jack's Abby. Jack's Abby Boston Rising First released in 2020, Jack's Abby's Boston Rising is a 'double hoppy lager' from one of the foremost lager purveyors in the state. Brewed with 2-row and Vienna malt, as well as citra hops, Boston Rising smells of pineapple and mango and pays tribute to the enduring spirit of the people of Boston. It also packs a punch at 8 percent alcohol by volume. Night Shift Brewing's Unicorn Tears. Night Shift Brewing Unicorn Tears Night Shift's tribute to the Trillium's Comeback Bru. Trillium Comeback Bru Brewed in collaboration with Tedy's Team, a charity running team connected with former Patriots star Tedy Bruschi, Comeback Bru is a light-bodied, hazy (of course, it's Trillium) ale made with signature Bru-1 hops. The beer has notes of navel orange and grapefruit, but also pineapple and subtle blueberry. A portion of the proceeds of the beer go to Tedy's Team, which supports stroke awareness and prevention. Gary Dzen can be reached at
