Runners won’t yield to terror
A city begins to pick itself back up with a steely resolve
The day after the tragedy, Boston let down its guard. Slightly. The crime zone on the Back Bay was still in full-on investigation mode, crawling with police and special units, but now with a brightly lit media encampment watching from the Boylston-Arlington intersection. Thirty metres away, a hulking, frightening soldier stood guard in front of the Taj Hotel, toting a semi-automatic rifle. I walked past him, eyes fixed on the sidewalk.
Elsewhere, some previously locked-down hotels allowed runners to come in and collect their belongings, after a 24-hour period when many wandered the streets or hung out in coffee shops waiting for the lockdown to lift. At the Marriott on Tremont, where I hung my ball cap for a couple of nights, staff finally stopped checking guest names at the door by late Tuesday afternoon. Freedom makes a comeback.
Everywhere, stories were told. In coffee shops, bars, hotel lobbies. Runners parted with group hugs. Runners poured into the Park Plaza Castle convention centre, where food, rooming assistance and counselling were offered. Primarily, it was the place where runners who were stopped at the 25.5-mile mark of the 26-mile race could collect the race medals they so richly deserved.
Lisa Kresky-Griffin already had her medal. A Winnipeg native, Kresky-Griffin makes her home in Minneapolis now and was part of a 62-runner contingent from the Twin Cities area. Their club is called Lifetime Fitness, but it could also be known as Lifeline, because each one frantically contacted fellow members to be sure they were all safe amid the smoke and debris. Once confirmed that all 62 escaped harm, they quickly relayed the news back to media in Minnesota so families could stop worrying.
First, though, Kresky-Griffin experienced her personal moment of terror. She had come through the finish line, prior to the two blasts, but as she checked her cellphone this was the last text she saw from her spectator husband Jeff: “I’m near finish line.”
“At that point, I panicked,” Kresky-Griffin said Tuesday. “Cellphones weren’t working. We finally reached each other by phone and met up in the hotel lobby. The minute I saw him, I just grabbed him and held on. We looked at each other like, ‘What the heck just happened?’ ”
With some of the other Minnesota runners, the Griffins watched the story of the bombings unfold on the hotel lobby television screen. They hugged each other. They cried. Lisa Kresky-Griffin cried again telling me the story.
“You still get so emotional,” she said.
You do. On Monday, I watched a hockey writer colleague from Ottawa talk on the phone with a relative who had just finished the race — barely ahead of the blasts. As the reporter got off the phone, his eyes welled with tears.
Tears continued to flow the day after the bombings, and not just because a fierce, blinding wind ripped through the city, casting dust and pebbles into the eyes of pedestrians.
Now, the Minnesota women — Kresky-Griffin, Diane Deigmann and a third named Tammy who just joined the breakfast gathering, asked me to take their photos as they clutched decadent, fattening treats from a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet: their just reward for completing 26 miles.
They had planned to take a tour of the Boston Beer Company, which brews the iconic Samuel Adams brand, but given Monday’s events, decided that was a little too festive.
“So, we’re going to Cheers for beers,” Kresky-Griffin said.
Good call. A disaster at one beloved Boston institution calls for repast at another institution around the corner. Reporters get thirsty, too. The bartender, Lisa, had no doubt her city and the marathon would rebound from an unspeakable act that killed and maimed children, among others.
Next year’s race? “It will be back, better than ever,” she said.
Lisa doesn’t think race organizers will move the finish line off Boylston Street, as some are saying.
“It’s been the same finish line for 117 years,” she said. “There might not be a grandstand at the finish line, though.”
Boston and environs are soaked in history: just follow the tourists on the yellow-painted walking line. Patriots’ Day features a re-enactment of the 1775 Battle of Lexington. The Marathon itself is draped in glory, but now, suddenly, without warning, a historic act that was gory. That won’t change. The race itself is inexorably altered, even as runners and citizens vow to soldier on.
“People who do these things don’t realize,” bartender Lisa was saying now, “that in the face of tragedy, we just band together and get stronger.”
Runners feel the same way. In a day and a half of conversations in hotel lobbies, in restaurants and on bar stools, I haven’t heard one say that he or she won’t return to run because of the April 15 bombs.
“I can’t wait to come back next year,” said Mike White, a 44-yearold industrial mechanic from Kitchener. “I’m definitely coming back.
“I don’t scare easily,” White said. “I’m not going to let some guy who’s got a problem with somebody else scare me away from something I like to do.”
They will mostly all be back, and maybe then some, as will the 118th running — a marathon grown a little more sober, a little more precious.