The Boston Marathon
What can I say? I’m a sucker for civic pride. This is the first year that I’ve worked somewhere they actually gave me Patriots’ Day—aka Marathon Monday, aka the day that sometimes also coincides with Evacuation Day, the holiday commemorating the expulsion of the British army from Boston during the Revolutionary War—off. But it should be a holiday for everyone, everywhere, and, in the past, I’ve either taken the day off or bargained for the opportunity to watch the marathon instead of going to work (I walked around wearing a brightly colored shirt with my company’s logo on it—something, I’d like to note, the Scientologists also do.)
While I hate running myself, I love watching other people do it. I’ll admit, I get all choked up when the first elite men and women go by, and then again as the regular (but still incredibly fast) people go by. A race is a sort of a weird sport to spectate—you catch people for literal seconds of a multi-hour event, and aside from who wins, there isn’t much to it. But, in those few seconds, there are so many different people*—joyful and determined and sometimes struggling and strong and all so, so impressive, from the first to the last.
Plus, there is everyone with you on the sidelines who, while doing significantly less work, are as much a part of the marathon as the marathon itself. Even in the rain, our usual spot near mile 23 was packed. We are, as ever, resilient.
Ten years ago, my friend and I were walking toward the finish line. Near Kenmore, someone in front of us turned to ask if we’d seen what happened, and that there’d been an explosion. I remember thinking he was lying, and I don’t remember exactly when I found out he wasn’t—just that there were suddenly so many helicopters, and that, at the corner of Mass. Ave and Huntington, we looked downtown to see ambulances filling the street. My phone wouldn’t work, but every so often a text would come through asking if I was all right, and they kept coming until we finally got somewhere we could say we were.
After I wrote most of this, I went back to my ten-years-ago journal to see what I’d said then, and my memory of it all was still much the same. The one thing I’d forgotten, which I’d written down then, was that there’d been a guy earlier in the day—one of the many thousands of people I’d seen for just a second—who was running with one of the street closure signs in his hands. He held it up above his head, and it read MARATHON: NO STOPPING.
*Getting word just now that one of this year’s runners was sentient ModCloth catalog Krysten Sinema. How can I become a bike spotter to boo her for 26.2 miles?