Watertown's Perkins School fields first Boston Marathon Team
Watertown TAB & Press, Thursday, April 16, 2009
By Christine Laubenstein, Staff Writer
WATERTOWN - For the first time, the Perkins School for the Blind will have a charity team in the Boston Marathon.
On Monday, 15 people affiliated with the school, including three Watertown residents, will be running the distinguished race.
Emily Goodman, the school’s Marathon coordinator, said the school had considered applying for a Boston Marathon charity team for several years. It finally did, and was accepted.
“What a great fundraising and public awareness opportunity — to be part of one of Boston’s oldest traditions,” she said.
Two of the Watertown residents running the race have never run it before, and one has run it once. Their main motivation is raising money for the school.
Each of the 15 runners has pledged to raise at least $3,000, which will go into the school’s general fund. The group as a whole has raised more than $105,000 so far.
The Watertown residents — team captain Mike Pecorella, 33, Christina Ashton, 29, and Erin Selke, 25 — are still looking for donations.
Whether the money ends up going to teachers, the Braille & Talking Book Library at the school, or resources for blind and visually impaired people across the world, they know it will be used wisely, they said.
“My siblings get books on tape from Perkins regularly, and they live in the state of Utah,” Ashton said, noting she has five visually impaired siblings. Ashton is a teaching assistant in Perkins’ Deafblind Program.
Selke said teachers at Perkins are better trained than they are elsewhere, and raising money for the school will help that continue. She is a teacher in Watertown’s Deafblind Program, and has experience teaching in Worcester public schools.
“It’s really individualized here,” she said of the philosophy at Perkins. “It was totally the opposite there.”
The Watertown residents said they decided in the fall they’d like to be part of the charity team. None of them are big runners.
“I was a college athlete, but never a distance runner by any means,” said Pecorella, a physical education teacher at Perkins who played soccer and football.
Selke, who once ran the Boston Marathon without a number (meaning she did not qualify or run for a charity), said she is only running it again because she’s doing it for a good cause.
They’ve tried their best to train as much as possible. Selke and Pecorella said they haven’t really had a set training schedule they’ve followed. Ashton, on the other hand, tries to do two 3- or 4-mile runs each week, in addition to a 10- to 20-mile run, and exercise walking, and using the elliptical machine at the gym.
“It’s like having another job,” she said, noting she is also in school at Tufts University.
Ashton said she will probably walk some of the race, while Selke and Pecorella said they are pretty sure they will run the race all the way through.
“It’s all about keeping pace,” Selke said, noting she had experience with that from swimming.
They are getting excited about the event as it draws closer.
On Tuesday, when they were interviewed, the weather was supposed to be between 55 and 60 degrees on Monday.
That’s much better than the scalding weather Selke ran the race in.
Each one has a plan for what they will eat the night before the race, and the morning of the race. Pecorella, for example, will have chicken ziti and broccoli the night before, and a banana and peanut butter sandwich the morning of.
“And a coffee,” he said. “I can’t forget the coffee.”
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