Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice by Scott Helman, Jenna Russell

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 likeBill 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. OrJohnny “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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    A pril 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