"We Run For Boston." A Runner's Account From the Marathon Tragedy

Image via sportsillustrated.cnn.com

When I first heard the news about the bombing in Boston on Monday, I immediately checked on my friend, Kat, who was running the race. I went to high school with Kat, and while we weren't incredibly close back then (I was a few years ahead of her), she's grown to be a constant presence in my life, through mutual friends and social media. Kat also spent a few years working at the Barclays Center, so we bonded over our undying love of City Sub and Zito's sandwiches. As I waited to hear Kat's status and frantically checked the news, I quietly said a prayer, hoping Kat was okay. Over the years, I've watched as she trained and ran marathon after marathon. And while I've always cheered Kat on, if I'm being honest, the fat kid in me never really understood what she got out of all these things. Now, in this moment where her safety was unknown, all I could think about was how much I wished I spent more time trying to understand. 

Luckily, Kat was okay. But she was only a few minutes and a few blocks ahead of the attack. So I asked Kat for a first-hand account of what happened to help me understand. And because her story was so moving to me, I thought you might want to understand too. 

The Boston Marathon is essentially the Olympics of amateur marathoning. It’s separated from all of the other marathons in the country, the world even, in that you have to qualify for it in order to run it. You qualify by running a previous marathon in a time under what the Boston Athletic Association dictates as the “qualifying standard” for your gender and age. Save for a few thousand runners in the charity field, the vast majority of the runners in the Boston Marathon have run a marathon before. In this race, it wasn’t the distance that made it remarkable, it was merely making it into a starting corral. It was supposed to be a special, unforgettable day for 27,000 plus runners and their families, because whether it’s your first Boston or your 44^th (yes, I saw a sign cheering for a man who was indeed running his 44^th Boston Marathon), it’s BOSTON. So many distance runners will only be able to dream of running it, and for some, making it here is the culmination of years and years of trying to meet that qualifying standard. Until 2:49pm on April 15^th, 2013, it was special day for all of us, our families, and our friends. At 2:50pm, it became an unforgettable day, for an unthinkable reason.

I was fortunate enough to be running my 2^nd Boston Marathon, the 6^th marathon I’ve run in my life. I was injured the first time I ran it, and vowed to come back and run it a second time, and dominate the notoriously difficult course. Life had other plans however, and I was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my right shin early on in my training, which derailed my plans for any domination of anything.  But it was Boston, and I was going to run it regardless, even if achieving a personal best was far out of reach. 

The Boston Marathon lives up to the hype surrounding it, and the energy of the city on marathon weekend is unparalleled. From picking up your bib number at the expo to riding a school bus from Boston Commons 26.2 miles to Hopkinton (where the race begins), to the athlete’s village which I can only compare to the Coachella of running, everyone was pumped, you could feel the electricity in the air. The city makes running the 26.2 miles back to Boston an incredible experience, and if you’re running with headphones on, you’re missing out. From the hospitality of Hopkinton residents, to the screaming girls of Wellesley, to the crowds sometimes 3,4,5 deep pushing you up Heartbreak Hill, to that final turn onto Boylston Street, the entire course is magic. 

I finished in an unremarkable time, having been undertrained, and struggling since mile 16. I gingerly limped my way through the finishing chute in a sea of marathoners walking like robots, grabbing my space blanket, medal, water, and a bag of food. I joked with other runners that we had all overdosed on Gatorade and never wanted to see it again. I remarked that all I wanted right now was a burger and a beer, and everyone around me felt similarly. I collected my baggage and struggled to do a simple tasks like untying my shoes and putting my warm-up pants on because my quads and hamstrings were locked up so tight I was convinced I’d never bend my legs properly again. So far, everything was proceeding exactly as it had the last 5 times I’d run a marathon. I made my way over to the family reunion area and found my dad. He had been watching me on Boylston Street, and knowing I would take a little longer than usual to perform the simple task of walking, stuck around for a few minutes after seeing me go by, before meeting me about 2 blocks from the finish line. He asked me what the plan was for the rest of the day. I told him that I needed to shower, and then I was going to come back downtown for beers and burgers with a few friends who had been both running and spectating. And then 2 booms shook the ground and this became a marathon much different from the 5 I had previously run.

After the first boom, I looked at my dad and asked him what he thought that sound was. He shrugged, and I looked around, and everyone seemed to be looking around quizzically. Then I heard, and felt, the second boom. There were no more quizzical looks, everyone seemed to understand what had happened, but not where, or why. Those were definitely explosions. The city got eerily quiet for a few seconds, like the calm right before a storm. Then came the panic. Cops running, then sirens, then everyone started moving in every possible direction. I texted a friend, and she began feeding me pieces of information she was getting via Twitter, because the major media outlets were still about 30 minutes away from picking up the story. My dad said I should call my mom, let her know that we were okay, because if this was something big, cell service might be hard to come by very soon. I called my mom, but she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying and she would call back in a complete panic later when she heard the news.

Still not comprehending the gravity of what was going on, my dad and I tried to head to the car in the parking garage near the Prudential Center, but at the first street we tried to go down, we were turned around by a man coming the opposite direction who ominously said “You don’t want to go that way.” Later we found out, “that way” was the chaotic and morbid scene unfolding one block away on Boylston Street. Every direction we went, we were corralled in an opposite one by police. Sirens were blaring everywhere, ambulances, bomb squad, cop cars. We talked to some people we passed, everyone had a different story as to what they had heard was happening. Another runner asked if she could borrow a phone, she couldn’t get to baggage to get hers and had to let her family know she was okay. It was about 30 minutes before we had figured out, via Twitter, that 2 bombs had exploded at the finish line. My first thought was, who the hell would want bomb a marathon? My second thought was, I hope they aren’t dirty bombs. I’m still waiting for the answer to the first thought, and if there’s one good thing to come out of this, it’s that my second thought wasn’t correct.

We wound up in a gym, attached to a hospital, attached to the Prudential Center. At this point, I told my dad, I needed to sit down. I had run 26.2 miles, we had been wandering around for an hour, and I still hadn’t sat down. Plus, my phone was buzzing with emails, tweets, texts and facebook messages from concerned family and friends who had seen the news that the major media outlets had finally picked up on. Mentally, I was on high alert at this point, thinking there might be more bombs, and that this might only be the beginning. After 5 minutes of sitting and as I’m responding to all of the messages that I could given the spotty cell service my dad had predicted, a guy walked past me who, on a normal day, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to. Today was different though, and something about this guy struck me as weird, so I turned to my dad and said, “Let’s go. Let’s get to the car, now.” In hindsight, that dirty man with the ragged clothes and strange look in his eyes was probably just another homeless person in Boston that afternoon. But in my heightened state of fear, anyone that looked even remotely out of place seemed threatening.

Another 20 minutes later we got to the car. At this point, we weren’t even sure we’d be able to leave the garage, let along get back to hotel in Cambridge. Another 20 minutes to get out of the garage, and a drive that should have taken 10 minutes took over an hour. Roads were blocked off, and there was gridlock everywhere. People were walking in the middle of the street, staring at cell phones, trying to figure out what was going on distracted by the all consuming thought of not being able to locate their friends and family. 

It wasn’t until we got back to the hotel and turned on the news that we fully began to understand what had just occurred. My dad and I were extremely lucky, we didn’t witness any of the devastation first hand, only the chaos that surrounded it. From just 2 blocks away, the dissemination of information was very poor. I should also point out that there wasn’t a whole lot of smoke, and what smoke there was was blocked by the tall buildings of downtown Boston, so other than hearing and feeling the blasts, we couldn’t actually see where they happened. I was also very fortunate in that I knew a lot of people in Boston for the marathon that weekend, and none of them were affected.

I don’t think I’ve actually wrapped my mind around what happened yet. We pieced together the timing later, I finished about 20 minutes before the bombs went off, and my dad was standing right across the street from them until about 5 minutes before they went off. I sometimes think that I might have run right past them, as they were just waiting to inflict the carnage and devastation that they did. My heart breaks for the three people that were killed and the scores that were injured. It’s not fair. Those people were there to enjoy a beautiful spring day in Boston and watch some lunatics torture themselves for fun for 26.2 miles. There are still so many unanswered questions and like all of America, I just want to know why. However, one thing that is for certain is that the running community will not be cowered by this act of terror perpetrated on our sport. Every time we run now, we run for Boston.  

- Kat Munson 

For more about Kat, follow her on Twitter.