Amy Noelle Roe - Becoming Boston Strong: One Woman’s Race to Run and Conquer the World’s Greatest Marathon

Copyright 2019 by Amy Noelle Roe

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Paul Qualcom

Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4205-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4170-6

Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Running, one might say, is basically an absurd pastime upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning in the type of running you need to do chances are youll be able to find meaning in that other absurd pastimelife.

Bill Bowerman

PROLOGUE: APRIL 17, 2013

A BOOM ECHOES throughout downtown. Another one follows. Looking west down Boylston Street, I see a plume of smoke rising between the buildings.

At mile 21 of the Boston Marathon, at the crest of the infamous Heartbreak Hill, Boston College students had erected a giant inflatable arch that triumphantly declared, The heartbreak is over.

Now, blocks from the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon, I sense the heartbreak is only beginning.

My hands are cold; my stomach is in knots. A shiver of fear runs through my body. Moments ago, I was relieved to be handed my gear-check bag, which had been misplaced. When it finally turned up, I swaddled myself in warm, dry clothes, comforted by the fact that finally Id done what I set out to do, and in the way that Id wanted to do it.

Im not a talented athlete. This is not false modesty; its a cold, hard fact. I didnt take up running until I was thirty-one, and at first, I was so self-conscious that I would only jog at night, hoping that no one I knew would see me. Running was hard enough; I didnt need the added pressure of an audience. Whenever I tried to run I was so uncomfortable that I imagined one would need a will of iron to force themselves to do it for long.

Still, to move through space with no help from anyone or anything seemed to me like the ultimate in independence and self-determination. And, outdoors, in the fresh air, was where Id always felt most at peace. So, while the activity of running didnt feel natural, it became for me increasingly aspirational, a way to bridge the gaping chasm between who I felt I was and who I hoped to be. I thought of runners as indomitable people, way out of my league. But I figured if I completed a marathon maybe I could call myself a runner, too.

Over the course of a few months I worked up the courage to run in the full light of day, but it took ten marathons over the next five years before I covered 26.2 miles fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. And then it seemed that I was cursed; three weeks before my non-refundable flight to Boston, an injury threatened to dash my dream of even starting the race.

My foot in a walking cast with the 2011 Boston Marathon three weeks awaythis felt like hell to me, or at least a kind of purgatory. It was like I was the ill-fated heroine in some black comedy. But to see myself as the protagonist in a story gave me some much-needed perspective so in my head I began to write that story, not knowing how it would end.

Stories had always come easy to me. Id spent more than a decade as a newspaper reporter and editor. Stories were how I paid the bills, but journalists are expected to be objective, to put a professional distance between themselves and the subject. In the newsrooms where I cut my reporter teeth, writing in the first person was strongly discouraged.

You, an editor once told me pointedly, are not the story.

After crossing the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, I leaned against a yellow school bus, exhausted but elated, and pulled track pants over my shivering body. I had spent years working towards earning a spot at Boston. Yet I was totally unprepared for what happened next, for the way that, in a matter of minutes, history seemed to be rising up all around me.

After the bombs exploded, I found myself in a breaking news eventone that I was experiencing, rather than covering. I was not the story, far from it. But as I told reporters what Id seen and heard, I sensed a larger narrative unfolding, one that began years earlier and would carry on long beyond the tragedy on Boylston Street.

CHAPTER ONE

Heartbreak

I AM CAUGHT in a crowd of runners shuffling feebly through the streets when my cell phone rings. My dads raspy voice is on the other end: Amy?

He has no idea what had just happened. He cant know. No one, save for those of us who have just seen and heard the explosions, knows about this yet.

Yes, Dad. Its Amy. Im okay, Dad. Im here in Boston. Theres been an accident, but Im okay.

A white lie. One look at the smoke that swirls up the side of the buildings and I know this is no accident and that deep down, I am far from okay.

When are you coming? Dad asks. This is the first thing he says when he calls me, which is on average five or six times a daysometimes more if I dont pick up. We always have the same short conversation, as if following a script. Dad either doesnt remember where I am and what I am doing, or he simply hasnt given it a thought.

Im coming on Wednesday, I say. Ill see you Wednesday, okay?

Okay, he mumbles and hangs up.

I snap my phone shut and keep on shuffling. This conversation comes as no surprise. Back in Seattle, my dad is recovering from a series of small strokes he suffered two weeks earlier. He lives alone, and a neighbor found him in his house and called 911. For once, Dad had been unable to refuse an ambulance. He was treated in the hospitals stroke unit and transferred to another facility for rehab a couple of days before I left for Boston.

My running coach, in his emailed instructions, said in the week leading up to the race I should avoid stress and focus on peaking. But I am the only person responsible for my Dad; my siblings both live far away. The week has been a flurry of phone calls to doctors, social workers, and family members to arrange for my dads care. All the while, Id felt guilty for fearing his latest crisis might keep me from getting to Boston and for wanting to come here and run instead of staying with him.