Hip-high, metal barricades corralled the race course on both sides.
Over 500,000 spectators packed the sidewalks--tall buildings on one side, metal barricades on the other. People poured out of Fenway Park onto the jam-packed sidewalk. There's a Red Sox home game each year at 11 AM on "Marathon Monday," and the Red Sox had just beaten the Tampa Bay Rays 3-2.
On the other side of the barricades, 23,000 runners filed by, about 25.5 miles behind them and the finish line finally in sight.
If you want rowdy, park yourself in Kenmore Square and bring a ladder (only kidding). The crowd swells when the Red Sox game gets out, and whether the Sox won or lost, they'll be um, very loud.
It was loud and slow-moving.
I tried to constantly watch the course, scanning up and down for my wife to come speeding by. But I didn't see her. My biggest worry was that she would make it to the finish line before me, and that we would not be able to find each other in the crowd and mayhem.
My phone had died about forty-five minutes earlier.
I had been hopping on and off the rail all day. Periodic text message had told me all day when my wife had run past a sensor, which were placed along the course every few miles or so. These alerts allowed me to use the train to travel from one lookout spot to the next and arrive just before my wife ran by. (Marathon runners appreciate seeing familiar faces along the route.) That way, I was not only able to cheer her on as she ran by, but that would incidentally know where one another was along the 26.2-mile course.
She had just run past the final lookout spot before the finish line. So I had hopped aboard the city-bound train to meet her at the finish line. As I sat down on the train, my phone died. This meant that I had no way to know when/if she crossed the finish line, and no way to communicate with her otherwise.
With hundreds of thousands of people crowding every inch along the course, this was a major problem.
So I rushed as best as I could to get to the finish line before she arrived. But the sidewalks were crowded with shoulder-to-shoulder people. Just breathing was tough, moving forward even harder. It took me about an hour to walk about a mile from the train station to the finish line (which normally takes only 22 minutes).
I exited the train around Kenmore and walked toward the finish line in Copley Square.
I've never minded marathons, so long as I wasn't the one running.
My wife is the runner, and "doing" the Boston Marathon had been her dream. To get there, she had to run a half dozen marathons over several years and eventually earn a "qualifying time." That entitled her to enter the Boston Marathon's annual lottery, which is the method for determining who gets invited to run and who does not. As with most lotteries, she didn't win on her first try.
When you lose the Boston lottery, you have to start the whole sequence over, which takes a minimum of a year to complete. You to have run some more marathons, earn another qualifying time, and then enter the lottery again the following year (because qualifying time expire). All of that just gives you a chance to get in, and it's really hard to get in.
Eventually she did get in, and even that felt like a huge achievement. My wife was excited, and I was excited for her. She was going to run the 2013 Boston Marathon.
About ten minutes before the first bomb detonated, I finally reached the finish line.
Both bombs were placed on one side of the street, and I was standing on the other.
My plan had been to reach the finish line and then stop. Having done a quick calculation, I thought my wife was still running. So I expected her to come into view any minute.
One problem I didn't anticipate, however, was the way that race officials had laid out the finish-line area. At most races, the barricades alongside the race course end at the finish line, such that if you walk alongside the barricades, you'll find that they end at or around the finish line. This allows spectators to then walk in any direction to find the runner they've been tracking. The Boston Marathon did it differently, though: they turned the finish-line area into a "VIP section." So when I reached the finish line, I found another set of barricades spanning the sidewalk between the race course on my left and the tall building on my right. The only way through was to present a VIP ticket, which I did not have. I had therefore reached a dead-end.
At first, I thought this was only a minor problem. From that spot, even though I could not proceed into the finish line area, I figured that I could at least watch for my wife to actually cross the finish line, which would confirm her location. Then, I could either yell at her--and hope she heard me over the din--or figure out a way to backtrack on the sidewalk to find another exit and then walk around the block to find her.
But after waiting there for about ten minutes, I realized that I must have miscalculated her finish time, because I had not seen her cross the finish line. There was a slight chance, I realized, that something could have happened to drastically stall her progress--an injury perhaps--but that had never happened before. So I instead determined that she must have already finished before I had gotten there. So I needed to find that exit.
The only option was to turn 180 degrees and walk directly into oncoming sidewalk traffic until I reach the nearest alleyway between the buildings lining the sidewalk (see the red line drawn on the map below). So that's what I did, and that I alleyway turned out to be Exeter Street.
When I finally reached the other side of the building, I found thousands of tired runners wrapped in Mylar space blankets and eating bananas. By sheer luck, I was able to spot my wife within five minutes.
I helped her to her feet, and we walked toward the nearby train station, which was under the street, down a flight of stairs. As we descended, we both heard a loud bang...and then another. We thought it was fireworks. Both of our phones were dead.
My wife had missed the explosion by about thirty minutes, and I had missed it by less than ten.
The span of sidewalk between the finish line and Exeter Street, on the south side of the course, is where I had been standing. The first bomb went off directly across the street, only about fifty feet from there.
Had my wife been crossing the finish line when the bomb exploded, she might have been anywhere from thirty feet to five feet from the blast.
In the photo below, you can see an American flag on the left side of the frame. The picture is shot with the actual finish line to the back of the photographer. The bombs thus exploded on the right side of this photograph.
If you follow that flag pole down, about midway down the pole, you'll notice someone wearing a bright orange shirt. That approximately where the VIP section begins. So, if you notice the guy in the yellow jacket standing on the street close to the center of this photo, you'll be able to visualize almost exactly where I had been standing: right behind the barricade, about five feet from that guy.
"It’s not just a marathon. For many distance runners, it is the marathon. It’s Boston."
Chris Greenberg explains why, for many runners, doing the Boston Marathon is supposed to be the ultimate hero's journey (which I've diagrammed in bullet points based on the general sequence of a hero's journey).
- In the beginning, you're just a normal person (and normal people don't run for 26.2 miles straight).
- But something inspires you to make running a marathon your goal.
- You start training, but because you don't yet have the physical fitness to endure that kind of punishment, you almost immediately begin to have second thoughts--it's really effing hard, after all.
- Each new milestone you strive to hit--5 miles, 7 miles, 10 miles, etc.--is an obstacle you've not yet managed to overcome.
- But then you do overcome those, and you keep aiming for harder milestones.
- The cycle repeats until, finally, you make it to the marathon starting line.
- The starting gun fires, and the race begins.
- What you experience thereafter will eventually feel like disaster: perhaps on mile 16 or mile 20, but almost always at some point prior to 26.2.
- You don't know if you can make it.
- But then, something strange happens; some people call it "runner's high," for others it might be confidence or just sheer determination; you reach a point where you know you will make it.
- The action/drama begins to descend, with each additional step still some degree of obstacle, but not as daunting as the obstacles were before.
- Then you cross the finish line: this is the climax of the hero's journey.
- You've done it. You've competed against yourself and won. You're the hero of your own story.
The opening line of David Copperfield reads:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
That's what a marathon is: a 26.2-mile chance to prove who the hero of your own life will be. And the Boston Marathon, for many, is the crown jewel of them all.
Imagine how the 2013 Boston Marathon runners must have felt.
The event lasts only a few hours, but the preparation often lasts years. Over five-thousand runners were not even allowed to complete the race because they were still running when the bombs exploded--and they were heading directly toward the blast site.
Because of the carnage that followed the explosions, it was hard to think about anyone other than the blast victims.
At approximately 2:49 that afternoon, with more than 5,600 runners still in the race, two pressure-cooker bombs—packed with shrapnel and hidden in backpacks among crowds of marathon-watchers—exploded within seconds of each other near the finish line along Boylston Street.
The blasts instantly turned the sun-filled afternoon into a gruesome scene of bloodshed, destruction and chaos.
Three spectators died: a 23-year-old woman, a 29-year-old woman and an 8-year-old boy, while more than 260 other people were wounded. Sixteen people lost legs; the youngest amputee was a 7-year-old girl.
But I guarantee you that every single runner that day was quietly experiencing a second tragedy of their own. The first tragedy was the terrorist attack and the people physically hurt by it. The second tragedy was that, for 23,000 runners--who had trained for years to get to that moment--the triumph of doing Boston in 2013 was indefinitely deferred, at least 23,000 years of training made fruitless in the span of 12 seconds.
When people are bloody, mutilated and dying in the streets, this second tragedy got shelved because no one felt right admitting to it. But it was there.
How you experience tragedy has a lot to do with where you're standing in relation to it.
When the bomb goes off and some part of it finds some part of you, you are the victim. For everyone else, including those looking back from the other side of the finish line (which it took them a year to finally cross), you don't feel like a hero.