Read, Right & Run Marathon

The Spirit of St. Louis Marathon will include a program pitched at students again this year. The Read, Right, Run Marathon sounds like a great challenge to students' minds, bodies and spirits. Kids at participating schools have been "challenged to read 26 books, “right” the community with 26 good deeds, and run 25 miles over a six month period." They complete their "marathon" on race day, April 8, 2006.

Maureen Houston at the Belleville News-Democrat reports on St. Mary's in Trenton and Trenton Elementary where students are running with their principal, Jay Goble and their P.E. teacher Dawn Musenbrock.

On a breezy March afternoon between rainstorms, student runners dropped backpacks near the school door and took off with their principal and P.E. teacher, running four laps around the school block, about a mile.

They streaked past classmates waiting for a yellow school bus to pull up, jogged past the church and its cross draped in purple for Lent, and tagged the outstretched hand of fifth-grader Dakota Grayling, outside the school entrance.

The kids comments at the end of the piece are terrific. I love hearing what they are reading: Junie B. Jones, Storm Breaker by Anthony Horowitz, Harry Potter, Islands (series) by Gordon Korman and very appropriately, Maniac Magee.