(And what | learned from it.)

OSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, April 15, 2013—I’ve decided I have to run a PR

B at the Boston Marathon tomorrow. I’ve got to. It’s the night before the race,

and I’m tossing and turning in bed, turning over modified splits and paces

in my head. I’ve never run Boston before, and even though I’m here as a charity

runner and have never run under the 3:35 cutoff time that would qualify me to

run in my age group, I still have to do right by the Boston Marathon, and it seems that running anything less than my fastest would be disrespectful.

Little do I know how much running a PR will mean to me tomorrow afternoon.

Together with my boyfriend, Alex, and our friend and colleague, Kelly, we arrived in Boston from Richmond, Virginia, two days ago. Kelly has been a longtime volunteer with the wheelchair race at Boston and is looking forward to reuniting with old friends. Alex, a filmmaker, has one of his films screening at the Boston Run Film Fest as part of the weekend festivities.

Apart from our individual reasons for being here, there is also this fantastic spark uniting us and underscoring the weekend, which is the fact that we’re all here together in connection with an incredible project we’ve been working on together, which we’ll officially begin in one month. On May 14, Alex and I are going to fly to France, where I’ll try to become the first person to run the 2,000 miles of the Tour de France course. Alex will film and drive as support, and Kelly is our project manager from the charity we will support and has become a close friend. We’ve come to Boston partly to bring attention to the adventure and have the chance to share it with kindred spirits at the world’s biggest running rendezvous, and the weekend marks an exciting step toward realizing our shared vision.

Very quickly, I learn that the marathon is only one small part of the Boston experience, the inevitable culmination of a weekend of anticipation, festivities, and story-swapping. On Saturday night, we head to a gala held in the exquisite and enormous ballroom in the Fairmont Copley Hotel, where the elites lodge. Kelly introduces us around, starting with the man of the hour, Boston race direc-

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tor Dave McGillivray. He and I both happened to have run across the country at age 23, and we swap stories lightly, until the conversation switches to Monday’s race and he asks, of course, what time I hope to run.

With so much history and ambition in the room | can’t bring myself to admit that my marathon best is 4:07. Also, I’m planning to simply treat the race like a training run because I’m in my final weeks of training for France, and I’ve just run 24 miles yesterday and the day before, and I’Il run 20 the day after the marathon as well. So instead of bringing up my 4:07, I tell the group about France and mumble that I’m just aiming for four hours. Ish.

Later on, we get to meet Joanie Benoit Samuelson, the rock-star runner from my home state of Maine. She will go on to place first in her age group on race day, but tonight she is incredibly humble and even a little reserved. She too asks what my goal is for race day and again I meekly explain France.

Some last-minute strategy changes

On Sunday morning, my parents arrive from Maine and we go to the expo to pick up my bag, which is, embarrassingly, sitting in the very last pile on the very last table and contains a bib with enough numbers to clearly make the statement that I am not fast. With bag in hand, I start questioning my strategy for the race. Isn’t it almost sacrilegious to treat the Boston Marathon as nothing more than a training run? How could I have even said that, and to Joanie Benoit and Dave McGillivray, two of New England’s greatest? How many people have trained for

© MarathonFoto.com

A Meeting two New England running greats, Boston race director Dave McGillivray (far left) and Olympian Joanie Benoit Samuelson, before the race.

months, for years, to get here? Who do I think I am? By nightfall, I’ve changed course and decide to go all in tomorrow.

After [have a carb-heavy dinner, my dad drives back home to Maine, leaving my mom to stick around and watch me alone tomorrow, which makes her a little nervous—in 36 years of marriage they’ve spent fewer than 10 nights apart, and the Boston Marathon is a huge, lively event. I lay out my clothes and go to bed, feeling nervous myself, sleeping in fits and starts.

At 5:00 a.m., my alarm goes off. I grab a coffee, walk a couple of blocks to the metro station, and catch the line to the Boston Common, where I’ll wait in line with other runners to catch an hour-long bus ride to the start in Hopkinton. Finally, I’ll wait 50 minutes more in the Athletes’ Village before walking the final three-quarters of a mile to the starting corral. It’s a complicated, tricky procedure just to get to the start of 26.2 miles.

But as I walk to the subway station, sleepy eyed and bundled up in the frigid morning air, holding my signature Boston-yellow drop bag, a warm lilt of pride floods my steps. Nearly every person waiting for the metro is carrying the same yellow bag and wearing that same grin: we are part of something, something of great integrity and honor, and today we are going to make history together. It’s normal enough to feel that way at the starting line, but it’s something else to feel it here inside a subway train, hours before the start, amid morning commuters and baristas.

The T lets us off at Charles Street along Boston Common, and when we climb up the stairs and out onto street level, a sea of Boston yellow hits us. The school buses are lined up like caterpillars down the street, farther than I can see, and scores of runners stand waiting to board, idly stretching, drinking coffee, looking for old friends.

We’re off

Just after 10:50 a.m. I cross the start line among a swarm of other runners and we are off. Mobs of spectators line the starting area, clutching their jackets tightly and cheering us on our way. As I begin to settle into my run, and three miles turns into four turns into five and six, these walls of cheers do not end. Flocks of people hover along the road on both sides, hollering, holding signs, playing music, handing out Twizzlers and pretzels. There is no break in their enthusiasm or in their presence. We pass college parties with their speakers blared race-ward, families with kids in strollers, and endless clusters of hands hanging out over the course, offering high-fives to all who pass.

I’ll admit it: at first, I hate this. It’s unnerving. People aren’t supposed to care about watching miles of amateurs running. It’s like we’re the comedian who’s opening up for the big act, only the big act has already passed and these people

are still here! It seems we couldn’t possibly live up to their enthusiasm. As the route moves forward through all the different neighborhoods, however, I feel the familiar haze in my brain and legs as I stride into my pace, tapping into it and staying there. I find a pack to hang with, swapping small talk and smiles. I grab Twizzlers from a young girl, and watch as some of the guys in our group pause in the part of the course aptly named the scream tunnel, where crews of cute girls from Wellesley scream and offer kisses, dates, and other assorted motivations.

Down a couple of guys, our pack moves along through the town of Newton, and for a while I run alongside several pairs of blind runners and their guides, impressively hanging at the same pace I am. With us in our little group are two guys dressed as Spartans in homespun garb and wielding swords, see-sawing in front of and behind me as they make their way like celebrities along the course, whooping and hollering and slapping hands vigorously.

Finally, I’m reeling in on the last 10 kilometers and realize I’m on pace to run a substantial PR. I feel strong. When I get to Heartbreak Hill, I’m three-quarters of the way up before I realize this is the Heartbreak Hill—months of training for France in the Blue Ridge Mountains have finally paid off. After that, all that remains is five miles, and nearly all of it is downhill. Boston gets a bad rap for its hilly course, based primarily on Heartbreak Hill, but in fact a lot of it is descending, and the last five miles especially are fast.

Kicking past hordes of screaming college students, I catch sight of the high-rises of the city and soon inhale the subtly different, thinner downtown air. It’s time to go for it. The last mile is a blur, enormous throngs of people yelling, pushing me faster and faster, and then I am blasting around that last corner, and the shock and noise of thousands of people screaming and jumping

Finally settling into a pace amid
the buzz on the course.

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© MarathonFoto.com

hit me like a mammoth wave of impossibly thick energy. There are dense walls of people on either side of the road, all exuberant, clapping, jumping, blowing into horns. I’ve never seen so many people in one place in my life. With 500,000 spectators, the marathon draws the biggest crowd of all New England sporting events. I pretend they are all there just for me, and I grin and sprint my last few hundred yards like I’m going for the gold, and the crowd spurs me on as I tumble across that redeeming finish line at 3 hours and 53 minutes.

A finish, a PR, all of it imprinted on my mind

The relief of finishing a marathon immediately floods my body and brain, and I remind myself to soak it all in, to never forget this moment, this race, this weekend, the very first time I ran Boston, to remember it all: the feeling of running a 14-minute PR, my first sub-four-hour marathon, of meeting my longtime hero Joanie Benoit, of hanging with some of the greatest figures of the B. A. A., of simply finishing 26.2 hard-fought miles. All of these grateful, elated thoughts are spinning through my head as I stumble ahead, grinning madly, looking for my mom and Alex and Kelly.

Did they see me? I had told them I hoped to finish around four hours or just under, so if they missed me they are probably still at the finish, expecting me in acouple of minutes. I don’t see them anywhere. There are thousands of screaming people, and as I blend in to the mass I realize how difficult it will be to track them down amid the packs of bodies.

I wobble through the finish line, exhausted now, getting my shiny space

<4 Rounding the final corner before the sprint to the finish line.

blanket and Gatorade and medal and turning my head around and around searching fora familiar face. There are barricades separating the finishers from the spectators, and the narrow sidewalk space is overflowing with families and college students and other shouting spectators. It’s madness, and it’s wonderful to be consumed by it. After not spotting Kelly, Alex, or my mom for a couple of minutes, I take out my phone and with 3 percent battery power left, make a quick call to Alex, and tell him I already finished and am heading along the procession of finishers. He tells me they somehow missed me and are still at the finish line but will walk down now to try to find me.

A minute later, while I’m picking up my banana, a loud boom goes off behind me, back toward the start. The boom is unlike anything I’ve heard before, not sharp like a gunshot, not a crack, not a whip, but booming, opening up from fine and piercing to dull and final. I look backward but can see nothing out of the ordinary. The woman who hands me the banana looks at me as I ask her what that sound was. She doesn’t know, but she continues to hand out bananas and tells me to keep walking through.

But I start gulping in air, my heart thudding with an uncertain fear as I squint around for my mom and Alex and Kelly. There are still people picking up their medals and PowerBars and for a moment I feel ashamed of myself, embarrassed by my fear. And then, from behind us, a second boom explodes through the air, similar to the first. Again, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary, but there are so many people that it’s impossible to see more than 20 yards back toward the finish line. When I look to the banana lady this time, she is stuck with banana in hand, midair, looking back toward the finish line, and I can see it on her face that things are not OK.

For an entire minute, I still try to think that everything is all right and maybe it was just an electrical problem. There are others who are also pretending or maybe still truly believing that everything is fine. But one by one I see the expressions on the faces of the other finishers around me falling, their eyes pooling up like mine, their necks craning, searching for their families. And in an instant, I know it’s serious. I don’t know what it is but I know it’s bad, like the foreboding feeling you awake with after a nightmare you can’t quite remember. I twist around and around, frantically looking for my mom and Alex and Kelly, trying to get through on my phone, but nobody picks up.

All I know is that one minute ago they were standing at the finish line, about 100 yards away from where I am now. I look and I look and I cannot find them, and so I run. I run away from the noise. I run to the school buses a block down the street, where our drop bags are being held. At the buses, half the runners are terrified and half are still elated, either unaware of what’s happening or unconcerned. Nobody knows which reaction to go with. Miraculously, a call comes through from Alex and he tells me in a panic that they are next to the Poland

Spring Truck diagonally across from the school buses. As soon as I hang up, my phone battery dies. I duck toward the truck and there, finally, I see Alex and my mom, holding hands, pale with panic. They tell me that Kelly ran back toward the noise to make sure I wasn’t back there. There is a minute of calm relief, during which time I retrieve my drop bag and we wonder whether it was all a bust.

Rumors of a sniper

But then the sirens start wailing, bursting through the barricades to drive down the street we are all standing on, and men are shouting “Everyone down! Down! Get down!” and people are jumping under the bus, and somebody yells that there’s a sniper, and nobody knows what is happening, and the scene deteriorates into complete chaos in a matter of seconds.

At the Boston Marathon, the half mile after the finish line is barricaded so that the spectators remain on the outside and the runners remain on the inside. What normally helps maintain crowd control has now become an awful trap, confining runners in a swarmed corridor of chaos as our families fight to find us on the other side.

People begin jumping the barricades then, pulling them apart madly, creating a pulsing stream of runners leaving the area. Other people are taking cover under the school bus. My mom and Alex and I, all three of us gripping each other’s hands, decide to jump the barriers. Alex is 6 foot 3 and gets over with no problem, and then my mom pushes me ahead, and then it’s her turn. She is struggling to get over it, and I try to help, and I’m so afraid that I don’t even want to let go of her hand. She gives me this heartbreaking look that I take to mean that she is scared she won’t be able to get over and that she’ll get left behind but which I later suspect might have meant something quite different, that she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to protect me, that she would be the reason we would all get stuck behind.

Finally, she makes it over to the other side and then we run. Lots of us are running now, in all directions, but after a few blocks we turn a corner and it’s like nothing has happened. People are shopping, sipping lattes, walking their dogs. In the midst of all of this we don’t know what to do with our panic. Do we duck in one of the cafes and calm down with a tea? Do we alert these people of what’s happening mere blocks away? Do we go back for Kelly?

We don’t have the answers to any of these questions, so we keep running. And then we walk. We walk and walk, across the bridge to Cambridge, and keep going until we get back to our hotel, a couple of miles away. At the hotel, there is no evidence of what has happened until we collapse onto the couch in front of the TV and the news is reporting two explosions at the finish line of the marathon, tentatively thought to be a terrorist attack. None of it makes any sense.

Sitting on the couch that afternoon, trying to understand it, trying to at least piece together the information chronologically, geographically, logistically, what I don’t understand is that it will never make sense. All of us who were there, we’ll never understand it. And the people who weren’t there, the reporters and politicians and even the well-wishers and our families, they will try to give us packaged, precise ways to understand and process it all. And it just won’t work.

Our phones are down, but we manage to communicate with Kelly through spotty text messages and one phone call. By late afternoon, she is in a lockdown situation at the hotel near the finish line, where we schmoozed with Boston’s best just 48 hours ago, and it’s not possible to go back for her.

She would later tell us that she ran back toward the noise, assuming that the giant screen at the finish line had experienced an electrical problem. When she arrived the scene was chaotic and she began helping other volunteers to direct spectators off the bleachers, not realizing that she was doing this because they thought there might be another bomb, because she didn’t yet realize it was a bomb that had exploded in the first place. But as she took in the sights around her, she thought she had stumbled onto a war scene. There were people down, blood, screams, smoke, chaos. She helped organize wheelchairs and got people into them as best she could. She lifted people with blood where their legs should have been, holding them, and with this touch, a simple tactile connection, she instantly and irreversibly attached herself and her brain to the horror of the situation. Once the police arrived, the volunteers were directed off the scene and into the hotel, where they were then held in a lockdown until after midnight. Much of this time Kelly has a hard time remembering exactly, her brain likely choosing to block such a sudden, disruptive trauma from her memory.

The world of what-ifs

From the hotel she tells us, in clipped text messages, that she is with friends and has spoken with her family. Her brother will meet her as soon as the lockdown is lifted,

and for now, she tells us not to wait, to leave Boston as soon as possible and go home to Maine.

What feels like a lifetime later, we are pulling into my driveway in Portland, running inside to see my dad, collapsing in a pile of hugs. That night in bed, it is impossible to sleep as I run through the list of what-ifs in my head. What if I had run the race in four hours, as I had planned to? What if I had decided not to run with my phone, and Kelly and Alex and my mom had still been standing at the finish waiting for me when the bombs went off?

In the days that followed, as we watched police hunt for the suspects, a few things became clear. I would never forget this race weekend, for reasons good and bad. I couldn’t understand why what happened had happened. Being part of the morning of the Boston Marathon had been a special, promising experience. With my yellow bag and my running shoes and bib, I felt like I was part of this incredible community and worthwhile experience, huge and powerful and rich with history and pride and quirks. I felt included, lucky, grateful. Even on the too-long, freezing- cold bus ride out to the start, even in the 30 minutes I waited in line for a porta-potty, even with my bib number that felt too high to be proud of, I was still proud and happy to be part of a race with so much respect and history behind it: a race that started with fewer than 20 runners and this year had more than 26,000; a race where blind runners participate competitively; a race where beer, kisses, and panties are among the goods proffered by spectators along the course; a race where female runners historically and unapologetically made their case for sports equality; a race that annually raises millions of dollars for charity.

And then that exceptional feeling had been crushed, disintegrated, imploded. At the finish line of a marathon, one of the most positive symbols in our universal language and one of the proudest moments of each finisher’s life, someone thought it fit to plant a bomb: at a finish line where we’re all the same; where we cease to be Americans or Europeans or Africans, Christians or Democrats, fast or slow; at a place where runners reunite with their cheering families.

At the place where we are all simply happy human beings, someone found reason to draw distinctions between them and us and fracture lives and families and talent. They chose to assume that everyone there, all of us there at that time, were not only unlike them, but enough unlike them that they wanted to end or ruin or damage our lives.

How can we possibly make sense of that?

The aftermath

I discovered that this event would have consequences far deeper than I had imagined, that would linger far beyond the day of the race. First, the manhunt in Watertown

five days later, ending in a gunfight in the streets, a sad, jolting example of life imitating the violent art of old Westerns, during which a police officer and suspect were shot and killed, adding two more deaths to the tragedy. And then there were the deeply personal aftereffects, the surprising, isolating consequences in the lives and ambitions of all of us who were there when it happened.

We went into the race together but we emerged privately fragmented. And while we were certainly united in our reaction and in our courageous determination to keep going, I just can’t accept that I could be the only one who felt the fracture and its silence more deeply than the resilience and its noise. And after being together in Boston, we all went our separate ways, returning to homes in our various comers of the world. Together in the tragedy, we were disconnected in the recovery, left to quietly watch the news on our individual TVs, one of the worst possible outcomes for those who endured a public tragedy together. In countless conversations with Kelly, Alex, and my mom, the effects remain hard to put words to. They slipped in after Boston and subtly derailed life as it had been.

For several weeks, Kelly didn’t return to work. Kelly had been our project manager for the Tour de France run since we first approached the charity she worked with, and her role had been crucial. Her talents and dedication had helped us land sponsors, develop professional relationships, and creatively deploy our mission in our community. This run was the most daunting journey Alex and I had ever envisioned, and Kelly had been the woman making everything happen just right behind the scenes. She had also become a close friend, a confidante, and a huge supporter. Without her, I have no doubt that our preparation would not have been as smooth as it was.

But when she did begin to work again, in a disruptive surprise to all of us, she was taken off the project. We began in France just two weeks later, feeling uprooted and anchorless without her guidance. The aftermath of Boston had made the return to her old job untenable, and her absence made our odyssey in France feel slightly off, like a train that was nudged off its track and can’t quite get back on.

And what | learned from it

At the end, of course, life goes on. It always does. Kelly left her previous job and found a great position elsewhere. She has made great progress in counseling sessions. I finished the Tour de France as I had hoped I would, and Alex is making the film. My mom has gotten better in crowds, as long as she has a hand to hold. The men who planted the bombs were found. Joanie Benoit placed first in her age group, and thousands of runners still finished the race.