• Blatchford: Runners’ mecca bonded by sense of community.
For well more than a century, it was perhaps the perfect expression of that ancient, lunatic, fundamentally lonely human desire to run fast and far.
There are a couple of older road races in North America, one of them the Around the Bay 30K race in Hamilton, Ont.
There are marathons that attract bigger fields ( New York, London).
Almost all the world’s bigcity races are more democratic, because to get to Boston all runners but those exempted for charity fundraising purposes have to meet tough qualifying time standards — that is, they have to be good.
So for 116 years, there was nothing like the Boston Marathon, sacred and brilliant, the running equivalent of Mecca. There still isn’t anything like it.
Now, to the usual hangover of a marathon, add the ghastly detritus so familiar in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and North Africa and the other parts of the world where improvised explosive devices might as well be in the wind, they are so ordinary.
On the day after the 117th running, there were along the 26.2- mile route the usual tender homemade signs still stuck to poles (“Go Paulie Go, You Look Fabulous,” “Amber, Mile 16,” “Kat= Run Run! ”), abandoned mittens here and there, clutches of cheerful balloons, water stations, portable loos and crowd- control barricades.
But there were also three dead, including that beautiful, gap- toothed kid, eight- yearold Martin Richard, 170- plus wounded, among them a new crop of amputees ( by their doctors’ accounts, every bit as grateful and gritty as their soldierly counterparts).
There were choppers in the air, Humvees on city streets, heavily armed soldiers at the entrances to hotels and subways and the din of wailing sirens everywhere.
The last time I thought to be afraid of IEDs I was in Kandahar, with the Canadian Army.
There, there were bicycle borne IEDs, pressure- plate IEDs, vehicle IEDs, IEDs worn by suicide bombers, remotely detonated IEDs. The bombers adjusted as fast or faster than the military Explosive Ordnance Teams sent out to find them.
The Boston bombs — there were only the two that exploded near the finish line, where the massive crowds were at their thickest, with the children, friends and families of 23,300 or so runners waiting, just like young Martin was — weren’t that powerful.
But this bomber or these bombers, whichever it is, weren’t planning to blow up heavy armoured vehicles, just people, only the softest, sweetest target there is. They adjusted, too. They tricked out their bombs, put together in pressure cookers, with nails and bearing balls to make them deadlier. FBI Special Agent Rick DesLauriers late Tuesday confirmed that, though it was Boston’s magnificent trauma doctors who first noticed.
As one of them, Dr. George Velmahos of Massachusetts General, said of the four amputations the staff at his hospital alone performed, “We just completed the ugly job the bombs began.”
He was moved, he said, by his patients’ resolve, that though they had lost legs, they were happy to be alive. But they were hardly alone in rising to the moment.
Allison Dellandrea, a Toronto prosecutor who was here for her first go at Boston with her husband and their three young children, had a similar experience.
She crossed the finish line about 25 minutes before the blasts, and was changing into dry clothes when she heard the noise.
“I turned and had a straightline view, that distance of two city blocks,” she said. She knew her family was two streets away in the meeting area, and that they were likely safe.
“Within minutes, I was with them,” she said.
As they made their way back to their hotel, “What amazed me as much as my shock was the organization and calm of the responders, the EMS and BAA ( the Boston Athletic Association, the race organizers).”
As all long the lovely, rolling course — it begins in the country and travels the old back highways — it felt like “there isn’t one foot that isn’t occupied by a person cheering for you,” so there at the end in the chaos were the volunteers in their yellow jackets, “politely keeping people at bay, not instilling fear.”
“Random happy Americans,” she said, “on a vacation day ( Patriots Day, the state holiday on which the marathon is always held), who spend the entire day very sincerely participating as volunteers on this glorious day.”
Police officers were directing traffic, and Dellandrea and her husband walked up to one of them and thanked him for his service.
“’ I’m really sorry about this,’” he told her.
“Don’t you dare apologize,” she told him, and started to cry.
“There he was, on this big,
These bombers, weren’t planning to blow up heavy armoured vehicles, just people, only the softest, sweetest target there is.
strong, proud day, goofy Boston Police hat, saying hi to a bunch of little kids,” she said.
She requalified for next year’s race, and is planning to come back.
So is Dave Emilio, who runs marathon clinics out of the Running Room in Toronto’s Beach area as a hobby.
This was his fourth Boston Marathon; he had what runners call a personal best, as did many of the 16 athletes who came here with him.
Though he fears the bombing will spoil it for people — “Every step is going to be, ‘ Is the bomb at Mile 20 this year?’” — he too wants to return. “You can’t be defeated,” he said. “You can’t let them win. You’ve got to hope the authorities do what’s necessary to keep it as safe as possible.
“Not coming back is a bit selfish, in a way,” he said.
He began running only six years ago, encouraged by a neighbour who ran with him to keep him going. Since that shaky start, Emilio has run 33 marathons.
For him, the discipline “keeps me responsible to myself on a daily basis,” and, though he didn’t say this, to his fellow citizens, too.
Marathon running is filled with contradictions, a solitary sport now so often done in huge crowds, the participants competitive usually only with themselves, internally, otherwise ridiculously peaceable and collegial.
Boston’s race starts at the Hopkinton Common, a small town square, follows Route 135 past grazing horses, tall pines, budding trees and the first flowers and loamy smells of spring. There was birdsong everywhere Tuesday.
The route goes through eight separate towns, some affluent and with sprawling homes, others less lucky and hurting, travels by used car lots, fastfood joints, cemeteries, American Legions, storied schools like Wellesley College and Boston College, and finally through Brookline and onto Beacon Street, with its gracious old apartment buildings.
“Leaving Boston,” Dellandrea’s husband said in an email from Logan Airport Tuesday, “everyone we met, from police officers to volunteers and mostly the common citizen, was nothing short of awesome.
“They’re a formidable people, the Yanks.
“I grew up next to them ( in a border town), but I’ve never been more impressed.”
As the Japanese- born ( and part- time American) author Haruki Murakami wrote in his best- selling memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.
“If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that.”
It’s the essence of the sport, a good metaphor for life and perhaps not a bad thing to remember, even now that the Boston Marathon is better known for death and darkness.