‘You just can’t break the spirit’ — a B.C. woman returns to the Boston Marathon a year later

EDITOR’S NOTE — The annual Boston Marathon will be run tomorrow, Monday, April 21. A year ago, tragedy struck when two bombs were ignited near the finish line. To mark the anniversary, Jack Knox departs from his usual humour column to tell a compelling story about a Victoria woman who was there a year ago, and will be there tomorrow.

COLUMN — Lori Stenson was in sight of the finish line when the first Boston Marathon bomb exploded.

She had turned onto Boylston Street, been lifted into one last glorious burst of speed by the roaring crowd, when a loud boom reverberated. “Maybe that’s in honour of Patriot’s Day,” the Kamloops-raised Victoria woman thought.

Twelve seconds later, a second, much louder explosion sent a cloud of smoke into the air. “That’s a bomb,’” she realized.

Stenson was exactly 100 metres from the finish, from the horror. She can say so with certainty, because when the cops jumped into the street to order the marathoners to halt, the runners all had the same automatic, unconscious reaction: they stopped their Garmin watches. Hers read 42.1 kilometres. A marathon is 42.2.

Stenson, 56, is back in Boston today, a year after the two pressure cooker bombs shattered the euphoria of that day, killing three and wounding 264.

She has unfinished business, a race to run Monday, something good to rebuild.

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April 15, 2013 was perfect for running. No wind, a little cool, sunny as the morning broke.

“It was a fabulous day,” Stenson says. She had been to Boston twice before when husband Don Costello ran, but this time it was his turn to wait at the finish for her. She ran in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, high-fiving kids, applauding volunteers, soaking up what she expected to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“Other than the day I married my husband, it was the best day of my life,” she said.

“There’s no place you run where you don’t have a crowd. You feel like a rock star.”

In retrospect, a change to her pre-race routine might have saved her from being caught in the carnage: she ate her usual bowl of oatmeal at 5:30 a.m. but, because her wave of runners didn’t start until 10:40, later snacked on half a bagel with peanut butter and banana.

That brought on a mid-marathon bathroom break, an unexpected time-costing stop worsened by having to wait for spectators to leave the PortaPotties. Frustrating in the moment, but she’s grateful for the delay now.

What she saw after the explosions was bad enough. Pandemonium erupted. Stenson saw people in hysterics, children crying.

The exhausted runners, their heads still in marathon mode, were the least panicked. They pulled apart the heavy-duty sidewalk barriers to get off the road. As they did so, a row of flags, representing all the runners’ countries of origin, toppled like dominoes.

Stenson found herself shivering on the street. She couldn’t get to the bus that held her warm clothes, or to the spot where she had arranged to meet Don. Couldn’t phone him, as cell service was shut down. “I started to cry, just a bit. I was afraid. I was afraid for Don because I thought he might be by the finish line or where the bomb went off.”

She wandered for an hour among the shaken, crying, numbed Bostonians. “It was like Zombieland, almost.”

Relief washed over her when she finally found Don.

The next day, the couple walked through streets lined by machine-gun-toting, camo-wearing men to a church where runners could pick up their medals.

They have a photo of Don placing Lori’s medal around her neck there.

Don’s hair, normally worn in a long ponytail, was short and sparse. For here’s the thing: They made this journey just three weeks after Don finished chemotherapy. This trip was supposed to be a celebration, not just for Lori but for Don, a man who had completed his third ironman before beginning treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

A marathon is the physical affirmation of the human spirit, an expression of joy — which made the bombings, the work of two young al-Qaida-inspired brothers, even more dreadful.

“It was such a senseless, crazy thing to do,” Stenson says. “You think of the people who were involved and they were just kids. You wonder how people so young could be filled with such hate.”

That’s why Stenson is returning to Boston — to defend what the marathon represents. She wants to support all the Bostonians, all the volunteers who pour themselves into the event. “You just can’t break the spirit.”

Marathon organizers granted automatic entry to anyone who was past the halfway mark but was unable to finish the 2013 run because of the bombings.

Stenson leapt at the chance. “There was no doubt that I wouldn’t go back.”

She is among two dozen Victorians who will run the fabled route Monday. “I have unfinished business. I want to compete and complete.”

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