Yesterday I had the pleasure of once again participating in The Run to Home Base event at Fenway Park. (If this sounds familiar, it should, here is my post about it last year, it also inspired an HNT.) This event is a joint effort of the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital, they’ve created the Home Base Foundation which provides funding for research and treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The start of the run is on Yawkey Way just outside the ballpark, the course crosses the Harvard Bridge and we run in Cambridge a little bit before return to the ballpark. The best part is that we re-enter the stadium through an entrance on Lansdowne St (which runs along the backside of the green monster in left field), enter the field through the garage door you can see in deep center field on TV broadcasts, then run along the warning track and finish right in front of the scoreboard.

About 30-40 feet past the finish line I stopped and took this photo with my iPhone. By the way, did you notice who’s at the top of the AL east standings?

The run was 9K or 5.6 miles. I’ve barely been exercising much and I knew that it was going to a be a little bit of a struggle. I wasn’t concerned as much with my stamina as I was with how my joints and feet would feel.

What I didn’t count on was the inspiration I would get from some of the others runners.

Barely a mile into the run I came up to a man wearing a backpack (which didn’t look light either!) that had an tri-folded American flag attached to it. I moved alongside of him and asked who he was carrying it for. “I lost a buddy in Afghanistan last year, this is in his memory.” My creaky knees didn’t seem to matter much all of a sudden.

Further along the course, somewhere near MIT on Memorial Drive, I reached this young man, a Staff Sergeant from the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft Bragg, NC. How about that, running 5.6 miles in full uniform and carrying what looked like a pretty heavy load.  Seeing him, I had no excuse for slowing down as the miles added up!

In 2 years the Home Base Foundation has raised over $5 million dollars. While the focus is on military members (it is estimated that 1/3 of the 2 million+ men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD to some degree), a number of events can trigger PTSD and the research this money is helping to fund will reach far beyond the military.

More than last year, I entered the event expecting to have fun and came home honored to have the opportunity to participate.