For local marathoners, race was a personal triumph

The start of this year's Boston Marathon seemed like a blur to spectators in Hopkinton. (SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF)

By now, most Bostonians know that a man from Kenya and a woman from Ethiopia clinched the top honors at the 112th Boston Marathon last Monday. But what of the hundreds of local runners who braved Heartbreak Hill this year? Devising our own on-paper race between 24 neighborhoods in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville with residents in this year's Marathon, we analyzed the results and came up with some local winners.

Our averages are based on all the runners, male and female, from each neighborhood, no matter the sample size. For example, Roxbury emerged as the fastest neighborhood in our survey, with an average time (3 hours 59 minutes 46 seconds) that was drawn from a pretty small group - only 14 Roxbury runners competed this year. Nevertheless, East Boston finished last (4:35:06) with 13 runners, and Cambridge managed an impressive third-place showing with 184 athletes averaging 4:06:10. In the party-of-one category, Mattapan's lone runner, Donald Roach, finished in 4:27:50, while raising money for Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Of the 1,392 runners in our survey area, Somerville's David Bedoya was the fastest. A member of the Greater Boston Track Club, Bedoya reacted with modesty when informed of his status as Boston's best.

"That's cool. That's good to know," the 31-year-old said, a day after he had finished the race in 2:27:33, 20 minutes behind the Marathon's four-time champion, Robert Cheruiyot. "I train with a lot of guys from the Boston area and from the [local running] clubs, so I thought I had a good chance."

Bedoya said he did the bulk of his training running to school - logging 110 miles each week running to and from Northeastern University, where he is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering. "My workout is commuting," said Bedoya, who freshens up in the school's gym and keeps a change of clothes in his office. "That's the only way I can do two things at the same time."

The Spanish citizen, who did not take up road running until moving here in 2006, also had the second-best time for Massachusetts runners.

"I'm going to take four or five days off now," he said.

As for the women, 24-year-old Amelia Bothwell of Roxbury was happy to learn that the personal record she had set the day before - 2:57:26 - also made her the fastest woman in our Boston-centric survey.

Bothwell was the 32d woman overall to cross the finish line and one of only two women in our sample to top her neighborhood standings. Last fall, in only her second marathon, Bothwell was among the top 100 females at the New York City Marathon.

The Harvard rower turned runner didn't take up her father's favorite sport until after graduating in 2005 and moving to New York. She worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for about a year and entered road races in her free time.

About a year later, she returned home to Boston and continued to gain steam on the road-race circuit. She asked her father, a former marathoner who was injured in 1990 when knocked off his bike by a car, to lace up his sneakers and end a 20-year hiatus from running.

"It was a nice opportunity to have someone to train with and bounce things off, compare war wounds with," Bothwell said. "I was so happy it got him back. It sort of built up his confidence as well."

Last July, she started managing a Back Bay yoga and apparel store called LuLuLemon Athletica. And after watching Boston host last Sunday's US Olympic marathon trials, she has a new goal.

"I get ridiculously competitive," Bothwell said. "When I see all these women in the marathon trial, and read about them, my first thought is, 'I can do that one day.' "