I don’t remember much of the last few miles of the Boston Marathon. I ran it in 2006, and around mile 23, I entered some bizarro nirvana, a meditative mix of exhaustion and pain. After so many hypnotizing thumps of your own feet, things become fuzzy.
But I do remember running around the corner toward Copley Square and physically feeling the cheers and applause of throngs of students, families, and gruff Irishmen from Southie. These weren’t familiar friends or relatives cheering for me and the thousands of other runners. These spectators, these strangers, cheered for hours to celebrate the accomplishments of runners whom they had never and probably never did meet.
Maybe it’s because everyone knows that man or woman in the neighborhood who wakes up before dawn to get those miles in. You see that neighbor in every runner. Every Kenyan, every Mexican, every Korean runner becomes a neighbor.
You don’t cheer for the “home team” at a marathon. You cheer for humans. All of them.
Today’s bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon is an affront to that spirit of universal goodwill. It’s not just an attack on an event or a city or a country. It’s an attack on our cheering for each other, on whatever race course we find ourselves. It’s an attack on that sincere, rare celebration of the neighbors we never realized we had.
(Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty)