Mim's on the cover of Sports Illustrated!

Mim’s in there somewhere. Click on the link to go to a larger version at SI.

My friend Mim Nelson has been on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, she’s been quoted more than once in the New York Times, and she’s been a guest on Oprah. And now, she’s on the cover of Sports Illustrated, too.
You’re gonna have to look pretty closely to find her on that cover, though: she’s there with 2,999 fellow Bostonians! A story in the Washington Post explains:

Over the weekend Sports Illustrated put out an open casting call for the image that would grace its cover on the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings and the result was stunning. “3,000 Strong” is the cover caption’s estimate of the number of Bostonians who turned out at the marathon finish line on Boyleston Street.

I met Mim when we were both dopey college students — we were on the same study abroad program in Austria. She’s Dr. Miriam Nelson now, the director of the John Hancock Center for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Tufts University in Boston. We’ve kept up with each other all these years, and when she was on The Oprah Winfrey Show touting her Strong Women series of books about the benefits of strength training, I stood in the audience to ask a question, mentioned my job modeling nude for art students, and Oprah used the clip in a special “Best of After the Show segment the next year. So thanks to Mim, I had a moment of Oprah fame myself!

Mim’s children are all grown now, so she and her husband Kin moved from the suburbs into a condo in downtown Boston. Mim ran the Boston Marathon last year, and she and Kin were looking forward to celebrating in their condo afterwards. You all know what happened instead.

One of Mim’s co-workers at Tufts was good friends with Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old who died in the bombings. I was in Vermont when the bombings happened, and Mim was still understandably shaken up when I called her a few days later. She’ll be running the marathon again this Monday, though, this time along with her daughters Eliza and Alexandra. She told me she expects Monday will be wonderful, but she’s looking forward to having it over with. “It will be good to get this year behind us, “ she said. “Boston is so crazy right now.”