Emotion stew: Patriot's Day Part 1

The waiting is the hardest part.

I’d been waiting all year to run Boston. I knew minutes into the devastation and horror of last year’s events that nothing short of catastrophe would keep me from my loved ones come Patriot’s Day. 

Loved ones here means: the Boston Athletic Association and its entire staff, the volunteers, and every single fan, including all police, firefighters and soldiers who’ve cheered me on either in person or in their hearts. 

I needed to see my people. I needed to let them know how much they mattered to me. 

Yup. I ran for love. I suspect most of us did. The love that day was palpable. 

I’m not a Pollyanna trying to fluff things off.  Hate was there too. And anger. Oh boy, there was a ton of anger there that day. But the love. . . I do believe love won that day.  

The hate and anger rumbled beneath the surface, bubbled up in random places. “No one fucks with my city.” Saw that poster quite a bit. “Fuck yeah,” I remember thinking, nodding my head, smiling a tight jaw-clenching smile, still waving thank you to everyone. 

We started the day with stern security guards who checked us over for explosives before letting us on the shuttle buses to the start. Then we saw the sharpshooters on the roof of Hopkinton High School. Not going to lie. That was hard. Seeing that, a piece of my heart broke right off. Then there was security lining all 26.2 miles, sometimes police or National Guard, sometimes protective rope that kept friends, frenemies, enemies, from jumping in and running with us along the course. 

I saw sadness. It was everywhere.  It belonged there. Rare was the runner who wasn’t wearing some ribbon, or marking to honor and remember Martin Richard, Krystal Campbell, Lu Lingzi, Sean Collier, as well as the hundreds of injured. Posters with their pictures lined the course. Some of us ran sometimes with fists clenched, jaws set, crying even.   

So the sadness was there. But then there was the joy. . . I’m not just talking endorphin rushes either.  The love was out there in your face, in every step, every shout of encouragement, every “you’re kicking liver disease’s ass” sign, every “shortcut this way” poster, every thank you, every vodka-spiked orange wedge, every cup of noxiously thirst-quenching, life-giving, stomach churning Gatorade.  And there were tens of thousands of flattened sticky gloriously used-up cups of Gatorade along the entire course, a veritable yellow brick road’s worth.  

I can’t speak for every one of the 33,000 runners out there, or for the hundreds of thousands of fans­­­. I can only say what I saw. I saw joy. I saw smiles. I saw random acts of kindness, like the guide who made an impromptu umbrella from a cardboard box and ran the whole race holding both his arms up in the air to shelter his blind runner from the relentless sun. I saw scores of runners swarming around father-son team Rick and Dick Hoyt, offering encouragement, and thanking them for their inspiration.  I saw multitudes of little girls holding posters with flowers glued to them. The posters said “Press for Power" and when you did – and I did at least a dozen times which was nothing compared to all the runners I saw stopping and pressing at every single poster-- you DID feel powerful.  

Maybe one reason for the feelings of power and joy is because I chose gratitude.  A few days before the race, when I was trying to plan for the day, I decided to make my race a thank you journey. I wrote the names of my parents and my daughters on the back of my shirt. I still had a ton of room. I sent out an email that I wanted to run with the names of loved people on my back. My friends and family responded with a singlet-load. I marked up my race shirt with the names of their important ones, some still on this earth, some living on through their loved ones. 

Two of the loved ones had passed quite recently.  One is the dad of ten beautiful children. I had the pleasure of teaching a few of them and knowing some of the others. That’s how the gratitude started, thinking about how awesome those kids are. The other dear soul is a former student who died suddenly and unexpectedly. His family sent a postcard with a bunch of pictures of him doing what he loved: hiking, camping, staring at sunsets. The script on the postcard says this: Don’t postpone joy.  

I’d always thought the world of this beautiful child. I met David my second year teaching, when I was still easy to dupe, hadn’t learned how to write on the board without turning my back on the class. I was still sorta shy and kinda tentative and even wore heels to school once in a while. 

We had whole school sing-a-longs once a week.  Sometimes the kids performed on stage. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think anything of it when David said he needed to leave our balcony and see the music teacher. Next thing I know, the kid is walking across the stage like a natural maestro, makes himself comfy at the grand piano, and leads the whole school in singing happy birthday to me. 

Joy wasn’t that hard an emotion to summon up whenever I thought of David, especially on Marathon Monday. 

So that’s my Boston Marathon 2014. 

Oh crap. I forgot to write about the running.