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

“three-mile island,” a cement island and dreaded tripping hazard in the middle of the road. At mile five in Ashland they passed the Sri Lakshmi Temple, with its fifty-foot tower and ornate statues of Hindu gods. It was near this spot in 1967, when the marathon was officially for men only, that outraged race official Jock Semple chased runner Kathrine Switzer through fat snowflakes, yelling at her to “get out of my race!” The confrontation—which ended with Semple being knocked down by Switzer’s boyfriend, and Switzer being banned from amateur running—helped bring about the inauguration of a coed marathon five years later. It became one of the most famous chapters in marathon history.
    King passed the Framingham bars and their patrons’ inevitable offers of swigs of beer, and the spot near mile sevenwhere a local Dixieland band used to play on the roof of R. H. Long’s Cadillac dealership every year, serenading runners below with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Around the halfway point, King arrived at one of his favorite places in the race, the mile-thirteen stretch past Wellesley College, where students at one of New England’s best-known women’s schools come out to watch in droves. Yelling at top volume for everyone who passes—a tradition almost as old as the marathon itself—the students create a “scream tunnel” that some marathoners find obnoxious or distracting but that King loved and drew on for renewed enthusiasm. He slowed down enough to slap high fives along the roadside, and scattered a few sweaty kisses on eager recipients waving signs like KISS ME, I’M A SENIOR and KISSES MAKE YOU RUN FASTER . The noisy uplift of support always tempted him to speed ahead. But he told himself to hold steady, to stick to his plan: every mile at exactly the same pace.
    As he finished miles seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, passing graceful Georgian mansions and the highway rumble of Route 128, King was on track to achieve his goal: a three-hour, ten-minute race. Then came the exhaustion, settling in at mile twenty, deeper, sooner, and more threatening than he had expected. Afraid that cramps might cripple him, the doctor slowed just slightly. Now he was in his own box, his own lonely struggle, in the midst of all the other runners doing the same thing. He hit mile twenty-two—the “haunted mile,” as marathon legend Johnny Kelley called it—the point where the body’s reserves of fuel and energy are depleted and a runner’s focus narrows to survival. He came to Cleveland Circle, and more clusters of college students. He kept going onto Beacon Street and into Brookline and on to Coolidge Corner. He was almost in Boston now, entering the final miles of the race. He crossed over the Massachusetts Turnpike and descended into Kenmore Square. This was the homestretch, with less than two miles to the finish. His family was up ahead, waiting for him. He turned his gaze toward the left side of Commonwealth Avenue, scanning the crowd as he fought through the pain, closer and closer to the turn onto Hereford Street. And then he saw them, his mother and father and Anne and their two little girls, screaming for Daddy.
    King veered toward them. He always stopped here to hug his children; he always somehow found the breath to tell them how glad he was to see them. He knew some other runners might not sacrifice the time—after all, he would see them soon at the finish line. But he meant to send a message, that his girls were more important to him than anything—certainly more important than the marathon clock. The meeting was a high point, and it would carry him to the finish.
    Turning left onto Boylston Street, he had run twenty-six miles. That left about 350 yards, or 1,050 feet, to the finish line. The crowd here was dense and deafening, thousands of people packed in so close together beneath the skyscrapers they looked like the colored dots of a pointillist painting. In the street, between the barricades