At the finish line

B.U. freshman Tim Wolfe got a front-row view of the Marathon's most dramatic finishes today, though not without cost. As a volunteer for Silver Wings, a civilian volunteer group associated with Air Force ROTCs, Wolfe woke up as early as most runners to help out with security around the race's Copley Square finish line.

Spectators often forget that Marathon participants are not the only ones exhausted from after the races many demands - thousands of volunteers also spend the whole day standing and performing repetitive tasks like handing out drinks or answering spectators' questions. Wolfe said spending more than eight hours on his feet proved a challenge despite its rewards.

"I never said I was tired until after I was done," he said.

At first, Wolfe said he found the finish line area surprisingly quiet even as wheelchair racers closed in on the area. Then the first wave of women's runners streamed in, followed by the men, and with them came a crush of rowdy onlookers.

As the Marathon's star harriers finished their 26.2-mile trek, Wolfe remembers being astonished as the top athletes "walked off nonchalantly" rather than collapsing at the finish line, still mustering the energy to walk off to awards ceremonies and press conferences nearby. On the whole, Wolfe said he had an ideal first marathon experience.

"The closer you can get to it, the better," he said.

Sox come first

Victoria Skiffington, 16, of North Reading, Mass., said she has never seen the Boston Marathon before, and this year is no exception. Though Skiffington and her friend Nick are only a block away from the marathon route, they chose instead to see the Red Sox play the Rangers. With the game winding down (Boston was up 8-2 in the bottom of the 8th), both are going back home before class starts tomorrow. Skiffington said she does not think she is missing much by going to the game.

"Not really," she said. "I mean, I choose the Sox over everything."

This year, the traditional Patriots' Day game at Fenway Park had a different impact on the race because the marathon began a few hours earlier than the usual start time around noon. Because of this, most game attendees began leaving Fenway while the middle and late finishers in the Marathon passed through Kenmore Square. Though the entire marathon route is more crowded than it was as the men's and women's leaders passed, so far the crowd is manageable and sidewalks still have a little space.

1-mile marker

Though they don't know him, marathon runners look happy to see the white-whiskered face of Glenn McKidden of Litchfield, N.H. McKidden is manning the 1-mile marker in Kenmore Square, in his 15th year as volunteer for the Boston Athletic Association. He rings a small cowbell to let runners know they've nearly made it to the end. Spotters like him serve to both encourage the runners and protect the mile markers from falling down.

Though he has never run a full Boston Marathon (he has run "two halves," he said, which might as well be considered "one whole"), McKidden said he understands the trials of running cross-country from his own athletic club in New Hampshire.

"Right about here, they're happy to be here," he said.

Cheruiyot wins again

Word is that Robert Cheruiyot won his fourth Boston Marathon earlier, though he didn't beat the 2:07:14 record he set in 2006. Cheruiyot was on pace to beat his all-time record as he reached the Beacon Street bridge, but he slowed down on Commonwealth Avenue before reaching the finish line, according to Boston.com's live marathon blog.

Drumming up support

B.U. sophomore Max Esposito is wailing on a silver bongo drum until it hurts.

"My hands are getting tired," he complains, but the show must go on. Esposito said he has a running tradition of playing the drum in Boston until people start dancing around him.

This is not Esposito's first marathon - growing up in nearby Holliston, Mass., Esposito said he has seen more marathons than he can count. It is, however, his first marathon in a tie-dye shirt and baby blue tuxedo-style blazer, an addition Esposito said he added to "spice it up a little."

Though there are no takers yet, Esposito said he is confident people will loosen up as the day progresses. Last year, Esposito said dozens of people started randomly dancing in the streets.

"I'm not sure what the catalyst was," he said. "Maybe alcohol."

From the sidelines

A few racers in wheelchairs have been passing for the last hour, but still no sign of the main runners. A chopper passed overhead two minutes ago, and birds are flying over Audubon Circle, as if to see what all the fuss is about.

The gatekeeper

Brookline Police officer Jimmy Riley is on his feet again for the 112th Boston Marathon, his 30th or 31st (it's hard for him to remember for sure). The first runners have not yet reached his post on Beacon Street near Coolidge Corner, so he's letting elderly drivers and one plainclothes officer who flashes his badge to drive through the barricades before the wheelchairs get here.

Traffic is a problem, Riley says, but the event shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in Massachusetts.

"It's been the same route every year for 112 years," he says. "This is advertised in the local papers and on TV, so it's no secret."

This race is different, Riley said, because it starts at 10 a.m. rather than the traditional noon, a change made thanks to a particularly hot marathon that exhausted so many runners that local hospitals had to set up mobile stations.

Now, the weather is perfect and the sky blue, which may be a boon to runners but a headache for local cops. Revelers get rowdiest when the temperature lets them get out and barbecue. On a day like today, Riley says local college students are likely to get out of control.

"As a cop, you pray for rain," he said.

Live blogging the Boston Marathon

Every year, about 20,000 runners from nearly every corner of the world test their physical limits in the Boston marathon, America's first modern marathon course. This year the race is again reported to be one of the biggest - WBZTV reports that more than 25,000 people registered for the 2008 trek, a number second only to 1996's record 38,000 entrants on the race's 100th anniversary.

All day today, the media will offer vignettes of the some of the race's more notable runners: Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong will compete, as will 2007 champs Robert Cheruiyot and Lidiya Grigoryeva. Many more students, professionals and retired people will test their own limits making it to the finish line. Some will race for charities supporting everything from Esplanade upkeep to cancer research, while other disabled participants, some of them in wheelchairs, will depart early from rural Hopkinton, Mass. to prove they belong here as much as anybody.

Yet to the average Bostonian, the story is as much about cheering bystanders and traffic snarls as it is about a friend competing in the race. Thousands of volunteers are turning out to maintain this local circus by providing first aid to runners, keeping crowds in check along the route's more crowded corridors and preventing the most daring spectators from swiping mile markers for personal souvenirs. Throughout the day, this blog will hear these people's stories and give irregular updates on the state of the race as it tears through Boston for runners' final few miles. Wi-fi willing, you will hear about it as it happens.

Debaters trade barbs on biofuels

By Andrew FitzGerald

Energy specialists differed sharply and at times personally on the merits of so-called biofuels Wednesday night at Boston University’s 25th annual Great Debate.

The debate, which was chaired by B.U. College of Communication professor Robert Zelnick, featured four energy experts as well as two undergraduate debaters. All were posed the question whether biofuel and renewable energy sources should become critical parts of U.S. energy policy, but the argument focused heavily on biofuels, which power everything from cars to electrical plants using agricultural crops.

“Biofuels are an energy solution that are for the most part good and have the potential to be great,” said Brooke Coleman, founder of the Northeast Biofuels Collaborative, a nonprofit that advocates biofuel use.

From the negative side, Robert Bryce of the anti-biofuel magazine Energy Tribune decried the economic costs of ethanol subsidies, calling the federal ethanol funding that Congress recently extended this year “fiscal insanity.”

“Corn is perhaps the biggest and the longest-running scam in American history,” he said.

Coleman defended the subsidies as necessary in light of similar handouts to oil companies, adding that biofuels have revitalized once-foundering state economies in the country’s midsection, where most of the crops for biofuels are grown, pointing to the large number of Midwestern states that have balanced their budgets.

“Is this evil? I don’t think so,” he said.

Though they had fewer hard facts with which to back up their case, student debaters Neil St. Clair and Ashan Walpita took broader views of renewable energy. Arguing for the affirmative side, St. Clair used flourishing rhetoric to tout the benefits of biofuels as an integral part of a “dynamic competition” that used solar, wind and other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Walpita, a junior at B.U.’s School of Management, warned that biofuels would drive food prices ever-higher, threatening developing nations like his home country of Sri Lanka and destabilizing the world economy.

“We are going to see job losses and we are also going to see slower economic activity,” he said.

Using a highly emotional appeal, biofuel advocate Sean O’Hanlon stressed the high stakes – namely, global warming and pollution – of not switching from fossil fuels. He noted that his own 8-year-old son suffers from pediatric asthma.

Not to be outdone, American Enterprise Institute scholar Kenneth Green said he grew up with asthma himself.

“I, too, am adamant that we will not make asthma worse, but ethanol will,” he said.

At the end of the debate, the audience was told to stand to one side or the other of the hall to show which side had debated most convincingly. Though the event, which was modeled after the debates pioneered at Oxford and Cambridge more than a century ago, attracted only enough students to fill a less than quarter of B.U.’s Tsai Auditorium, the affirmative side still convinced enough attendees to win the night.

Zelnick thanked the participants for a spirited debate despite the poor turnout and promised as he had at the beginning of the debate that the debaters would soon “retire to a fine Boston restaurant.”