Massachusetts Fun Facts

I'm running a neat little 5k race in Cambridge this weekend as part of their Oktoberfest celebration (costumes are encourages and oh I have my costume ready!). The girls and I are flying to Boston, doing a little Boston authors kind of tour, eating pizza in our room, and paying outrageous in-room movie pricing as part of this weekend jaunt. As with all our states, I like to throw in a sprinkle of education with "fun facts."

Boston is one of my favorite towns and I never tire of visiting there (love San Francisco as well!). So let's begin with some odd stuff that makes MA awesome:

1. Boston built the first subway system in the United States in 1897.
2. There is a house in Rockport built entirely of newspaper.
3. The Fig Newton was named after Newton, Massachusetts.
4. 1634: Boston Common became the first public park in America.
5. Glaciers formed the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard during the ice age.
6. The Boston Tea Party reenactment takes place in Boston Harbor every December 16th.
7. The first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated in Plymouth in 1621.
8. The official state dessert of Massachusetts is Boston cream pie.

Yay 34 states! Massachusetts, here we come!

My BHAG

During the 1990s Jim Collins and Jerry Porras rose to fame with their business theories and case studies. They even coined a catchy term - BHAG - and wrote a series of Harvard Business Review articles and a couple well-regarded business books, Built to Last and Good to Great. How does this apply to running? Very simple. Tackling 50 states has become my BHAG - my Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. Now, clearly my goal is not as visionary as Google's, which was to "organize the world's information" or as bold as Microsoft's "a computer on every desk and in every home". But my BHAG of completing a race in all 50 states does fit Collins and Porras' definition of "having a clear finish line, so the organization [my family] can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines." (1996)

I never thought my business and academic reading would apply to my real life. But as I was lying in bed this morning, I enjoyed giggling that I, too, just like Google and Microsoft, had my very own BHAG. The finish line will be Hawaii and we are nearly at the half-way point when we complete the 24th and 25th states in July. And, yes, I am looking forward to this exciting finish line.

Happy Monday.