ENG Master Lecturer to Run in Boston Marathon
Enrique Gutierrez Wing first moved to Boston in 2013, three months before the Marathon Bombings. Every year since, he has watched the race pass by his house in Brookline and thought: “I’m going to run it one day.”
A Boston University College of Engineering master lecturer in mechanical engineering, Gutierrez has always loved running, but he struggled to get to the level required of a marathon runner—until he joined the Boston Roadrunners, a running club that taught him proper training and nutrition.
“I would have never thought about [running the Marathon] if I had to train on my own,” Gutierrez says. “After eight months of training with them, I thought I could run my first marathon.”
His first marathon was in Baton Rouge, La., in January 2024. The humidity made it difficult, but he completed it, although just a few minutes short of the qualifying mark for Boston.
“I was kind of shaky because I had never run anything close to that, but I finished it. I’m not gonna say in what condition I finished it, but I finished,” he says. “My legs felt like just two pegs.”
Seven months later, Gutierrez ran California’s Santa Rosa Marathon. He finished the race, which wound through vineyards, in 3:12.53, about 22 minutes below the qualifying time. He says he knew then that he had to run Boston.
Gutierrez says he’s proud to be running for the Iris Johanna McDaniel Memorial Scholarship, named in memory of his BU colleague Gregory McDaniel’s daughter, who died in 2020 at age 22.
The scholarship, run by UMass, supports students who are facing homelessness or food insecurity while getting a college degree.
“I grew up in Mexico, and I started in Mexico,” Gutierrez says. “I do not come from a high-resource community. I know what it means to do a university degree while having to shift with a job and having to do other things. It’s hard. I want to create awareness that there are people within our community, even though you might not see it at BU, who are really in need.”