Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice
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The roots of the Boston Marathon reach back to the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. Most of the delegation representing the United States came from the Boston Athletic Association, a sports and leisure organization the city’s heavy hitters had established almost a decade earlier. In those days, the ornate, Gilded Age BAA clubhouse on Boylston Street had a gym, a bowling alley, tennis courts, and Turkish baths. Boxing, fencing, and water polo were among the most popular sports. Inspired by the marathon in Athens, the BAA decided to stage its own race closer to home. On April 19, 1897, fifteen men competed in the first Boston Marathon, then called the BAA Road Race. New Yorker John J. McDermott took the inaugural crown in 2:55, despite walking at various points during the final miles. Initially the course was 24.5 miles long, later stretching to 26.2 miles in accordance with the standard distance set by the 1908 London Olympics.
In the century that followed, the Boston Marathon became one of the premier road races in the world. It made folk heroes out of American runners like Bill Kennedy, a New York bricklayer who won the 1917 race despite sleeping the night before on a pool table in Boston’s South End; as he sprinted toward the finish, fellow “brickies” working on a building along the route clapped their bricks together to cheer him on. Or Johnny “the Elder” Kelley, who competed in no fewer than sixty-one Boston Marathons, winning two of them. Or Ellison “Tarzan” Brown, a member of the Narragansett tribe who rarely trained but won the race twice on his natural athleticism. After World War II, the marathon became an international draw, with runners from countries like Japan, Finland, and Kenya asserting their dominance in different eras. Later, the American running boom of the 1970s created a surge in interest, fueling exponential growth in the size of the field. The 1975 Boston Marathon had 2,365 entrants. Thirty years later, it had 20,405. The race’s popularity grew to the point that getting a bib number became a sport unto itself—the registration window for the 2011 marathon closed in just eight hours and three minutes. Qualifying for Boston hadn’t been easy, exactly—noncharity runners had to achieve competitive times to even enter—but race organizers ultimately had to tighten eligibility requirements further. A few thousand runners, no matter how slow, still get bib numbers every year after committing to raising healthy sums for charitable causes.
Once upon a time, the Boston Globe printed the names of all Boston Marathon entrants prior to the race. Spectators would then bring the paper to the course as a guide, calling out to each runner as he passed. “When you ran Boston, you felt a respect and admiration that runners garnered nowhere else,” 1968 men’s champion Amby Burfoot wrote in a 2013 essay for Runner’s World. “In other races, we were often mocked. Boston welcomed us, honored us.” Plenty of cities—Chicago and New York, to name two prominent ones—have developed their own marathon traditions. But the spirit of the Boston Marathon has remained distinct, its hold on runners—and on the city’s soul—lasting and exceptional.
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April in New England was famously fickle. Runners had faced winter-like conditions in some years and unforgiving heat in others. The prospects for this Monday, April 15, 2013, had seemed tailor-made, as if McGillivray had ordered it up: pleasantly cool, a high near 50 degrees, a mix of sun and clouds. As he walked the starting line, he saw smiles on runners’ faces. He saw the gears of his machine turning, all the pieces moving as designed. His year-long planning and relentless attention were paying off. The 117th Boston Marathon was poised to go off as well as could be.
The only break from routine came just before the 10:00 A.M. start. The race organizers asked everyone to pause for twenty-six seconds of silence, one second for every victim of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, four months earlier. McGillivray and his team had scripted a brief ceremony and arranged it so runners across Hopkinton could take part. In the midst of a noisy morning, a blanket of quiet settled over the area. Runners put their heads down or looked to the sky. McGillivray joined the silent gathering, right at the starting line, moved by how still thousands of runners could be. After it was over, he recorded his emotions on his iPhone: That was one of the most amazing moments in forty years of my involvement with the Boston Marathon.
The power of it struck David King, too. One of his daughters was a first grader, like the twenty children killed in the school shooting. As the silence deepened around him at the starting line, he thought about the randomness of what had happened in Newtown, how it could have been anyone’s kids. King had worried more about his children since going to Iraq as an army surgeon—the experience of war had fundamentally altered his sense of his own and his family’s vulnerability—but now he felt humbled by horrors he couldn’t imagine. Flooded with gratitude for his family, he felt lucky to know they were safe. As the opening ceremonies wound to a close, King began to focus on his race. He needed to figure out when to turn on his GPS tracker, the device he wore around his wrist to tell him how fast he was running and whether he was on pace. The trick was to activate the tracker just before the gun, giving it sufficient time to find his position but not enough time to needlessly drain the battery. Everyone else in the corral around him was attempting the same feat, the chirps from their gadgets filling the air as if they stood in a summer meadow full of crickets. King pushed the On button. The starting gun cracked and the elite runners took off. Moving slowly toward the starting line behind them, he saw that his tracker was still searching. Come on, he thought. Almost there; come on! Just as he crossed the line, the bars popped up on the screen. It was a satisfying way to kick things off: stepping onto the storied course in perfect sync with distant satellites circling the Earth.
In the first four miles of the marathon, the elevation of the course drops some three hundred feet, creating the illusion that the race is all downhill. That’s partly why in 1990, the national governing body for track and field sports ruled that Boston’s marathon could not be the source of world or national records. The downhill start has long troubled elite runners, because it speeds the pack of amateurs along; four-time winner Bill Rodgers once said it allowed runners “who aren’t necessarily world-class” to stick around long enough to be “bothersome.” When he first ran Boston, King had felt the same annoyance as inexperienced runners bolted down the hill behind him, nipping at his heels. It took half a mile before the swarm would thin enough that he could start running with his normal stride length. In time, though, he had come to embrace the madness of the start, the distinctively careening, jammed-in, jostling movement forward. It was crazy and uncomfortable, and it felt like home.
McGillivray was also in his accustomed spot, well out ahead on the course. He had hopped on the back of a motorcycle that would take him to Boston, always several paces ahead of the leading runners. This was how he kept tabs on everything: whether the green wax paper cups of Gatorade and Poland Spring water were stacked correctly, whether the volunteers were at their posts, how spectators were behaving. He scanned the course for trouble—an errant car, a bicyclist riding where he shouldn’t be. But once he was out there on the road, he began to feel like he had handed the race off, giving it to the runners and volunteers and police and everyone else strategically positioned all the way into downtown. It was like a relay. McGillivray had run the initial legs. Now he was passing the baton.
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The first few miles went quickly for King. The runners passed from Hopkinton into Ashland just before the two-mile mark; around mile four, as the surrounding landscape changed from rural to suburban to commercial, the pack had to navigate around “three-mile island,” a cement island and dreaded tripping hazard in the middle of the road. At mile five in Ashland they passed the Sri Lakshmi Temple, with its fifty-foot tower and ornate statues of Hindu gods. It was near this spot in 1967, when the marathon was officially for men only, that outraged race official Jock Semple chased runner Kathrine Switzer through fat snowflakes, yelling at her to “ge
t out of my race!” The confrontation—which ended with Semple being knocked down by Switzer’s boyfriend, and Switzer being banned from amateur running—helped bring about the inauguration of a coed marathon five years later. It became one of the most famous chapters in marathon history.
King passed the Framingham bars and their patrons’ inevitable offers of swigs of beer, and the spot near mile seven where a local Dixieland band used to play on the roof of R. H. Long’s Cadillac dealership every year, serenading runners below with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Around the halfway point, King arrived at one of his favorite places in the race, the mile-thirteen stretch past Wellesley College, where students at one of New England’s best-known women’s schools come out to watch in droves. Yelling at top volume for everyone who passes—a tradition almost as old as the marathon itself—the students create a “scream tunnel” that some marathoners find obnoxious or distracting but that King loved and drew on for renewed enthusiasm. He slowed down enough to slap high fives along the roadside, and scattered a few sweaty kisses on eager recipients waving signs like KISS ME, I’M A SENIOR and KISSES MAKE YOU RUN FASTER. The noisy uplift of support always tempted him to speed ahead. But he told himself to hold steady, to stick to his plan: every mile at exactly the same pace.
As he finished miles seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, passing graceful Georgian mansions and the highway rumble of Route 128, King was on track to achieve his goal: a three-hour, ten-minute race. Then came the exhaustion, settling in at mile twenty, deeper, sooner, and more threatening than he had expected. Afraid that cramps might cripple him, the doctor slowed just slightly. Now he was in his own box, his own lonely struggle, in the midst of all the other runners doing the same thing. He hit mile twenty-two—the “haunted mile,” as marathon legend Johnny Kelley called it—the point where the body’s reserves of fuel and energy are depleted and a runner’s focus narrows to survival. He came to Cleveland Circle, and more clusters of college students. He kept going onto Beacon Street and into Brookline and on to Coolidge Corner. He was almost in Boston now, entering the final miles of the race. He crossed over the Massachusetts Turnpike and descended into Kenmore Square. This was the homestretch, with less than two miles to the finish. His family was up ahead, waiting for him. He turned his gaze toward the left side of Commonwealth Avenue, scanning the crowd as he fought through the pain, closer and closer to the turn onto Hereford Street. And then he saw them, his mother and father and Anne and their two little girls, screaming for Daddy.
King veered toward them. He always stopped here to hug his children; he always somehow found the breath to tell them how glad he was to see them. He knew some other runners might not sacrifice the time—after all, he would see them soon at the finish line. But he meant to send a message, that his girls were more important to him than anything—certainly more important than the marathon clock. The meeting was a high point, and it would carry him to the finish.
Turning left onto Boylston Street, he had run twenty-six miles. That left about 350 yards, or 1,050 feet, to the finish line. The crowd here was dense and deafening, thousands of people packed in so close together beneath the skyscrapers they looked like the colored dots of a pointillist painting. In the street, between the barricades containing the twin rivers of spectators, the pace of the race was quickening. Runners who had walked up Heartbreak Hill or walked through Kenmore Square—none of them were walking now. The finish line up ahead was the same one the winners had crossed just an hour earlier. The crowd was screaming now just as it had for the winners. It was the same race, and they were all in it together. King took the time to register the magic of that. He thought about the time, in 2009, that he had fallen down in the street after crossing the finish line, his face contorted in pain, and how another runner had come to him beaming, asking how he felt. King had mumbled something about cramps. “You should feel great,” the other man had told him with conviction. “We just finished the Boston Marathon!”
King crossed the finish line and slowed to a walk. Then, as he always did, he stopped and turned around to face the runners coming in behind him. Standing there a minute, looking back down Boylston Street, he listened to the roar of the enormous crowd and watched the runners’ faces as they finished. He considered the magnitude of what they had accomplished. He tried, for just one moment, to consider what it meant. Then he turned back into the natural flow of traffic, away from the finish and back toward his regular life, the search for water and bananas and his family. They would be coming to find him in their designated meeting place, by the sign marked K, the first letter of his last name.
Around the same time, at 1:45 P.M., McGillivray sent a text message to Tom Grilk, the executive director of the Boston Athletic Association. With everything appearing okay at the finish line—with the winners long done, and thousands more having already crossed behind them—McGillivray thought the time had come to put on his Adidas and begin his own run. Hi Tom, he wrote. All seems fine so may head out soon. Okay? Great job!
Beat it, Grilk replied.
The words from Grilk—unequivocal, assured—meant a lot. McGillivray sometimes felt trepidation seeking this permission. He was the race director, after all. Asking to leave the scene always felt like a big thing, a little part of him believing he was abandoning his troops, even though he ran with his phone in his hand. At the same time, running the course was a deeply personal obligation, one he did not intend to break. Ever since 1973, he had kept the promise to his grandfather to finish. His start time varied year to year, depending on how things were going. In 2012, he didn’t begin running until 8:30 P.M. because the crippling heat had sent so many runners to medical tents and hospitals. That year he crossed the finish line just shy of midnight. Sometimes when he ran, people along the course, not knowing who he was, would shout words of encouragement like “Hey, you slug, the race is over!” or “The eighty-year-old guy went by hours ago. Pick it up.” With Grilk’s reply this year, McGillivray began preparing for his cherished routine—the ride to the starting line from longtime friend Ron Kramer, the state troopers’ escort through the course, the companionship of running buddy Josh Nemzer, and McGillivray’s brother Bob shadowing them in his car, ready with water, Gatorade, and food, including a batch of chocolate chip cookies made from their mother’s recipe. The heavy responsibility having largely fallen away, McGillivray could now allow himself the privilege of worrying only about pushing his body through 26.2 miles. It would be the capstone to another successful year, another satisfying feat. “Beat it” were just the words he wanted to hear.
CHAPTER 4
FINISH LINE
Gathering on the sidelines
Shana Cottone reported to roll call before 9:00 A.M. The spot where cops assembled, the Boston Police Department’s District 4 station in the South End, was directly behind the massive stone Cathedral of the Holy Cross. The bosses handed out assignments for the marathon: Shana was to be stationed on Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, five or six blocks beyond the finish line. After roll call, though, another officer approached her and asked if she would swap assignments so he could work the Common with a friend of his. Shana agreed without hesitating. She would gladly go to Boylston Street to patrol the finish line itself. It made no difference to her. She parked beside the library and got to work.
A rare holiday spirit swept the city on this day each year; everyone seemed to be wound a little less tightly. The party-like atmosphere could present its own headaches for police, however. Shana figured she would deserve it if a pack of drunk, obnoxious college students came her way. Not so long ago, the twenty-seven-year-old police officer had been a college kid herself. She and her Northeastern friends had not always been on their best behavior when they came to the finish line, sipping wine out of plastic cups and climbing on the chain-link fence by Lord & Taylor until the cops yelled at them to get down. Now the tables were turned; any rowdiness would be, for her, a kind of karmic payback.
The street, though, remained fairly quiet at 10:00 A.M. Most college students were probably just getting out of bed.
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Marathon Monday began early for Heather Abbott. It was barely light outside when her friend Jason Geremia picked her up in Newport for the drive to Providence, where they would catch a train to Boston. Jason was like an older brother to Heather, a little bit bossy and overprotective. In the car, he talked about being single; Heather was newly single, too. “I’ll be your date anytime,” Heather told him. They were friends, nothing more, but they were close. People often mistook them for a couple; people who knew them well understood why they weren’t. It worked the way it was, and neither one wanted to change it. Sitting on the train to Boston, laughing with their friends, was like a scene out of high school. When the conductor kicked them out of the quiet car for being too noisy, it only made them laugh harder. They got to the city at 9:30, stopped for coffee, and headed to Fenway Park for the Red Sox game. The first pitch was at 11:05.
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The crowds at the finish line built quickly and steadily through the morning. The marathon winners came across around noon—Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia for the men, with a time of 2:10, and Kenya’s Rita Jeptoo for the women, in 2:26. Governor Deval Patrick crowned them with the traditional wreaths, made of olive leaves that came all the way from Greece. Typically, the governor crowns the women’s winner and the mayor crowns the men’s. But Boston mayor Thomas Menino was in the hospital, recovering from surgery two days earlier on a broken leg. With great reluctance, he had called Patrick to ask him to do the honors. It pained Menino to miss out on a day he loved. Just two weeks earlier, he had announced he would not run for office again, after a record twenty years in power. He had never missed a marathon, and he would not get another chance to be there in his ceremonial role. The mayor’s favorite part came later, though, after all the dignitaries had departed. He often stayed for hours, watching the waves of average people cross the finish line.