Runner Turns His Back on N.Y.

--Yves Pol is a man who knows where he’s been, even if he doesn’t always see where he’s going. Pol ran the entire 26.2 miles of the New York City Marathon backward, finishing in 4 hours and 40 minutes, about the middle of the pack of 22,000 runners. “Mr. Pol had been suffering from a lung infection for the past several days, so his time was not as fast as he hoped it would be,” said Shondar Dalton, the owner of an athletic shoe store in New York who spoke on behalf of Pol. Two guides ran with him to warn him of obstacles, but Pol, 34, fell several times during the race. Pol has been running long-distance races backward since 1985. Ibrahim Hussein won the marathon with a time of 2:11:01.

--Wildlife officials have resorted to rock and rhetoric to frighten hungry sea lions away from spawning salmon and steelhead trout in Seattle. State and federal biologists have played blaring tapes of the heavy-metal rock band Motley Crue and the speeches of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, in addition to bombarding the water with weighted M-80 firecrackers and chasing the sea lions with boats. But still the animals feast near the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks for Lake Washington, wildlife department biologist Bob Pfeifer said. Experts estimate the sea lions near the locks last year ate nearly 2,600 steelhead, or 43% of the Lake Washington run. Without human harassment, Pfeifer estimated the sea lions would have eaten nearly 1,100 more of the trout.

--Becky Farrar of Hinckley, Ill., won’t soon forget this Halloween. A pumpkin that had accidentally been dropped 2,200 feet by sky divers who had been tossing it back and forth crashed through Farrar’s kitchen roof. No one was in the house at the time of the accident. “If this had happened an hour earlier,” she said, “we would have been sitting at the table having lunch. . . . There were shingles, dry wall down, plywood, insulation and splattered pumpkin all over the place. The kitchen table is what broke the fall of the pumpkin. That table is broken too.” Police arrested Brian Voss, 30, and Alfred McInturff, 50, both of nearby Naperville, at a local parachute center. They were charged with reckless conduct and released on $100 cash bond each, a DeKalb County sheriff’s spokesman said. The cost of repairing the 15-inch hole in the roof has yet to be determined. Farrar said McInturff stopped by the home, 60 miles west of Chicago, to apologize and offered to pay for the repairs.