A Little Friendly Publicity

Those people who know me real well know how much enjoyment I get out of seeing people recognized for the great things that they accomplished.

I've gotten comments from The Courier's publisher, Jim Fredricks, that he was glad to see many of the responses that I've received over the weekly running column on Sundays in his paper and that I was getting some attention. I told him once, via e-mail, that I could honestly care less if I got recognized one way or the other.

I mean, seriously, I've had my 15 minutes of fame and then some. And there's a lot of times where I've contributed to something that I've explicitly said for my name not to be attached to it - even when I know something will turn out well.

While pouring through the results of Texans at Monday's 111th annual Boston Marathon, I noticed that one runner, Ann Affolter, 29, of Dallas, was the only Texan of the 711 finishers who improved their 5K split each of the eight 5Ks throughout the race. She was also one of only 41 Texans who had a negative split.

During my days of covering high school athletics here in Houston and across the state of Texas from the mid-1980s to 2001, one of the many relationships that I developed was with Dallas Morning News running columnist Debbie Fetterman when she worked for the now-defunct Houston Post.

I dropped Debbie a note about Ann's achievement. Click here to see what came of it. :)