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Running for loved ones

The 62-story John Hancock tower rises into view when Kristy Walsh runs Heartbreak Hill just outside Boston. Chris Mello, her longtime boyfriend, worked in that skyscraper before Sept. 11.

Tom Frost will stop twice near where his daughter Lisa, then a Boston University freshman, cheered him on in 1999.

Frost, a Southern California Electric employee who lives in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., has run 30 marathons. Walsh is an assistant to the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. She's never run a marathon. Their lives came together when two planes from Boston's Logan Airport hit the World Trade Center towers in New York 18 minutes apart Sept. 11. Walsh's boyfriend and Frost's daughter were on those planes.

On Frost's shirt will be his daughter's picture. "It says, 'In loving memory of Lisa Frost.' Walsh will run with her sister and a friend, and is determined to finish "even if I have to walk the last 10 miles."

Luis Gonzalez won't have to give DNA samples after all. No more gumshoe detective work is necessary. The Arizona Diamondbacks All-Star outfielder has decided to end any controversy over the authenticity of a piece of already-been-chewed-by-Gonzo gum being sold at auction on the Internet.

A no-longer-amused Gonzalez said he would chew a new piece of gum in front of witnesses yesterday morning in Denver. "This thing has kind of gotten out of control," Gonzalez said before the Diamondbacks' game at San Diego Wednesday night.

Gonzalez will send the new gum to a Tucson, Ariz., radio station that plans to broadcast the chewing. The station will send the gum to the top Internet bidder. The collector of the original gum, Jason Gabbert, has said the money from the auction will go directly to a Minnesota high school.

The highest bid so far is $3,275 by Dave Pierce, a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.