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

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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    T he 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