How Was Your Holiday?

Asking someone 'how was your holiday' is always quite a fraught question.  For many of those who work at Felsted, the 'holiday' is just the Easter weekend, with the school remaining busy for many of the departments, with external lets using the facilities, work going on across the site, and preparation in place for the new term. For others, the holiday included expeditions, including what sounds like an incredible visit to Costa Rica (once the initial journey was resolved), as well as Duke of Edinburgh expeditions and the Rugby Tens up at Sedbergh. For those facing public exams, the 'holiday' will not have been a holiday, with much work being done to prepare for the upcoming challenges. We had a good number of our IB students back in school last week, getting ready for exams which start as early as next week, and of course our Lower 6th students are doing their internal exams this week, so will also have been busy in preparation.  
 

I spent the Easter weekend in the wonderful city of Boston, before taking on the Boston Marathon on Monday.  It was fascinating to be able to visit Harvard University, at a time when the US Government is blocking funding (we were there the day before a protest), and to see the museum at MIT, which traced the history of Artificial Intelligence among many global scientific breakthroughs from that institution.  We were able to see the cultural influence on the city of theatre and music, the beautiful parks and the terrible traffic!  We saw the bay where the Boston Tea Party took place, a protest against unfairness in global tariffs (a case of not learning from history?!). Our visit also coincided with the 250th anniversary of the midnight ride by Paul Revere, which alerted the locals that British forces were advancing across the Charles River. This led to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which triggered the American Revolutionary War and ultimately the independence of the USA (declared on July 4th 1776).  
 

Monday was the day of the marathon and it felt as though the whole city had stopped for the event. The runners are taken by school bus out of the city to the little town of Hopkinton, where we gathered in our thousands ready for the start. With wheelchair racers and elite groups starting first, there was a bit of waiting before the main groups of runners were taken down to the start line. Running 26 miles back to Boston meant that we made our way through various towns, with each one seeking to outdo the one before with the number and noise of the crowd. Wellesley College is a noted highlight of the course, where all the pupils are outside cheering on the runners, but the hardest part was, without doubt, the hill at 21 miles known as Heartbreak Hill. This broke a few of the runners and drained what little energy others had left, before the final stretch into the city, where the crowds were even bigger and even louder.  
 

Boston is an historic place, and its marathon is equally historic.  It started in 1897, the first of the annual city marathons around the world. It is also the place where the first woman ran in a marathon. Previously, the distance was deemed 'too hard' for women to take on (a dispiriting thought for someone who was passed and beaten by hundreds of women on Monday!), but in 1966 Bobbi Gibb ran the race, despite not being allowed to enter the race officially. She was famously followed by Kathrine Switzer, who entered using only her initials, and marshalls tried to drag her from the track during the race. By 1972 women were allowed to compete officially and the first women's Olympic marathon took place in 1984 at Los Angeles.  

Boston is also infamous for the bombing of 2013, when three spectators were killed and 500 more injured when two radicalised brothers detonated two powerful explosives near the finishing line of the race. Security for spectators was high, and there was a significant police and military presence around the event, but I am pleased to say that there were no incidents and the 129th Boston marathon was a celebration for the tens of thousands of runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators.