WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - Steve Sinko will run his sixth Boston Marathon next month, knowing quite well the demands lurking there.
Last Sunday’s 55th annual Caesar Rodney Half-Marathon hinted just how different and challenging this year’s 26.2-mile jaunt from Hopkinton to the Boylston Street finish in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood will be.
Sinko made the final, torturous climb up Market Street to the Rodney Square finish line while pushing 23-year-old Nick Scarberry in a Fusion Inclusion racing chair.
Then he stopped, put his hands on his knees and took a few breaths.
He had certainly earned those.
Among Delaware’s top runners since his days as a two-time state 800-meter champ at St. Mark’s High, Sinko, now 41, still finished 18th overall while covering those hilly 13.1 miles in one hour, 25 minutes and 52 seconds.
Scarberry, 23, of Elkton, Maryland, has autism and mild cerebral palsy and is non-verbal, said his father Preston. He wouldn’t be able to run a race himself. But he appeared delighted from having completed the Caesar Rodney Half-Marathon with Sinko.
“This is race number 23 for him,” Preston Scarberry said. “He loves people and wants to be out with people. We have a younger son (Dylan) who’s 20, and when Nick saw him playing sports he wanted to come out and kick the soccer ball around and stuff like that. That made him want to be more active.
“I pushed him once in the Main Street Mile. He’s 145 pounds and the chair is 40. For Steve to have done what he did today, in an hour and 25 minutes, that’s really good.”
At Boston, Sinko will push Preston Buenaga, whose mother, Deb, spearheaded the area running inclusion movement while propelling her son, who has mitochondrial disease. In 2016, they completed their first marathon together at Virginia Beach.
“I had no reason to go back to Boston myself. I’ve had the experience,” said Sinko, who ran his fastest Boston, a 2:28:25, to place 56th in 2010. “It’s really about going back up there and taking him through it that day and letting him see something like that.
“It’s great because it’s going to give us a lot of exposure for what we do having these chairs. There are a lot of places that still think they’re a liability and don’t want them in the races or limit them. And I understand that. We’re very safe about what we do at Fusion Inclusion and Fusion Racing but there’s no reason you can’t have these and give people a chance. It’s the one sport that (because of the chairs) anybody can do it and anybody should be able to do it and it’s gonna be cool to give him that experience and let him see what it’s like.”
The Boston Marathon is where the idea of runners pushing someone in a wheeled device was born, thanks to Dick Hoyt and his son Rick. Hoyt pushed his son in 32 Boston Marathons through 2014. Seeing them always brought even more noise - and a few tears - from the huge crowds lining the route.
Like independent runners at Boston, those pushing someone in an adaptive chair must earn a qualifying time to enter. Sinko and Buenaga, now 19, did that at the Philadelphia Marathon in 2016 and will be one of just eight such teams at the 116th Boston Marathon on April 16.
They are the first starters at 8:50 a.m. in the mobility-impaired category.
“Preston and I will among the first people to cross the line that day, so that’s cool,” said Sinko, a personal trainer at Newark’s Fusion Fitness who coaches cross country and track at Newark Charter.
“The big thing for that is, Preston’s run a lot of races around here. He’s done stuff with his mom. He’s done Marine Corps (marathon). He’s never seen anything like Boston, with the crowds. Even when we were in Philly, which doesn’t have a hundredth the crowds of Boston, he was amazed when you went by the spectator spots.”
That’s part of the allure, Sinko added, to give those who wouldn’t normally experience the thrill of Boston’s cheering throngs that sensation. But it’s also to experience those challenges the runner endures.
“The reason I do this is to give these guys my perspective of racing,” he said. “People who want to push, they get nervous because they’ll say ’I can’t push like you do.’ I’ll say ’Well, that’s all right. It’s not about you back here. It’s about the person in the chair, giving them the experience. They don’t care how fast you go.’
“For me, I can give them my perspective of racing, and it’s just going to be cool for Preston to go out there and see all that.”
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Information from: The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., http://www.delawareonline.com
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