If You’re Going Through Hell, Try and Have a Good Time About It
An un-inspirational story of the Boston Marathon bombings.
This is a story I heard probably a year or two after the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s one of my favorites, and it took me years to realize that it was told by the host of one of my favorite radio shows, NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.”
It was a story about the host, Peter Sagal, guiding a blind runner on the day of the marathon. During the last few miles of the race, Sagal encouraged his runner to resist the urge to walk, to not stop running. To not give up. Because of that encouragement and persistence, the pair arrived at the finish line only a few minutes before the blasts. Sagal’s takeaway, after much reflection on that day and his own mortality, was this: If you’re going through hell … keep going.
What a story, right? It’s hard to imagine one more inspirational, especially if you’re a runner. We tend to get dramatic during the throes of our self-inflicted misery, and it’s right up our alley to have that drama validated by a tale of life and death. Sure, we could walk it out on our next training run, but pushing through the pain could save our lives. For anyone who doesn’t have it in their DNA to quit, it’s the perfect motivator.
Well, for anyone who does have it in their DNA to quit, I’ve got good news. This is my story, and it’s the exact opposite of Mr. Sagals’. I’m not quite sure it’s inspirational at all, but it’s the only story I’ve got.
I was also in the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, and I was also guiding a runner. I was a “lifeguard,” which meant I was running the last six miles with a runner and helping them overcome any mental hurdles that would keep them from finishing. The lifeguard system was one that our cross country coach had developed over his years pulling double duty as coach of our team and head of the school’s marathon club. He had a healthy stable of Division II runners (see: fit nerds) to aid the marathon runners, and we were happy to lend some fresh legs and words of encouragement.
Except I’m really not that great at encouraging. Years later, as an assistant coach, I would go on to be one of the biggest pushovers my high school cross country team had ever seen. The boomers are right about at least one millennial — if I’d had the budget for participation trophies, everyone would’ve gotten one.
So when my best buddy (and future author of the book “Running Wild”) Bobby told me he was hurting and wanted to walk, I had no objections. He had just absolutely cruised the last few miles after a surge of energy at Boston College (future site of Bobby shotgunning a beer during this same race) and was feeling good for the most part. If he wanted to take a breather, that was fine. It was his day, after all.
Until it wasn’t. At mile 25.7, we were met by a hastily assembled police blockade. If you know anything about the Boston Marathon, you know this is a particularly cruel place to be stopped. We were within spittin’ distance from the two most famous turns in the running world; a right on Hereford, a left on Boylston, and there was the finish. But we were stuck.
Right away I told Bobby to keep moving, because there was no way they were going to stop the freaking Boston Marathon. That was like stopping the Super Bowl, which, in Boston in 2013 was an equally objectionable notion. Probably more so if we’re being honest. But as the minutes ticked by, it became clear we weren’t going anywhere. Bobby sat on the curb, and I joined him.
The news coming in was scattered. At first, we heard the blockade was just a quick precaution. Then we heard there was a transformer explosion. Then we didn’t hear much of anything. Reality began to set in that the runners weren’t going to finish this race, and as we wondered what could possibly cause such an outcome, the police started giving us instructions to leave the area. We got the news that there was an attack at the finish line, and seconds later I got a text in my family group chat: “Get the fuck out of Boston.”
Bobby, a paramedic who had family at the finish line, tried to work his way toward the danger, as people in his incredibly brave line of work so often do. I, who had no family at the finish line and would go on to become a stand-up comedian, high-tailed it in the opposite direction, as people in my incredibly cowardly line of work so often do.
What followed was confusion. I walked along with everyone else, but I’m not sure I ended up really getting anywhere. We were all just kind of stumbling around dumbstruck, like the zombies in “The Last of Us,” or, more appropriately for 2013, the zombies in “The Walking Dead,” or “The Last of Us” video game.
I do remember one thing in striking detail. The weather was absolutely incredible — sixty-five and sunny. You couldn’t dream up better running weather, especially for a race like Boston, which sees freezing rain and hypothermia one year, then humid temperature spikes and heat stroke the next.
We walked through the streets of Boston in throngs, not knowing or caring where we were headed. Trees lined the sidewalk with their flowers in brilliant bloom, exploding in the warm April sun. A woman in her well-earned marathon foil blanket turned to me. “The flowers are so beautiful today,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be thinking about that now, but I can’t help it.”
I think about her a lot.
I found Bobby soon after we had separated. Either he had been turned around quickly by the police or I had simply been wandering in stunned circles like an idiot. Probably a little Column A, a little Column B.
He had gotten in touch with his family. They were alright, and they were coming to meet us a little ways away. Well, most of them were coming. His father, Bob Sr., also a paramedic, had very much the same instincts as his son. He had run from the finish line grandstands straight to the street as soon as the bombs went off, and began treating victims immediately. Bob, or Big Bob, as everyone knows him, may well have been the first responder that day.
Big Bob is a hero. In addition to being a hero, he’s also an incredibly silly human being. A day earlier, he had broken out into moans of pleasure while trying out a massage chair at the runner’s expo, “When Harry Met Sally” style. It was his attempt to help out the salesman by drumming up some business, because as everyone knows, nothing sells a massage chair like a burly Bostonian man with a mustache yelling “OH GAWD YES” to strangers.
There was no “I’ll have what he’s having” when Bob’s show was over, but it was pretty close. Instead, he popped out of the chair and shook the salesman’s hand with a cartoonish cry of “I’ll take it!” True to his word, he ordered it on the spot. But with the chaos and heroics of the next day on his mind for weeks after, he forgot all about his plan to cancel the order, and soon ended up with a $5,000 massage chair delivered to his front door. I’ve used it, it’s very nice.
I’m adding this tidbit because, in addition to being one of my favorite stories, I think it’s nice to view our heroes outside of their feats. We rarely give them the opportunity to show their other dimensions. Not the heroes on screen — every Marvel character gets their required “Wait, we have to fight THAT?!” once a movie, but our real-life heroes are rarely afforded such quips. As soon as someone becomes a “hero,” everything gets very serious.
“That man’s a hero,” we whisper in hushed tones as a stern mayor hands over the key to the city, while we all pretend it’s not incredibly silly to get a key to the city. Pretend that we’re not all wondering what you even do with the key to the city. Does it open some kind of giant door? Do you have to give it back the next time there’s a hero? Does it open the door to the mayor’s house? Do you get to go and hang out with the mayor whenever you want? Is the mayor a swinger? Is this a sex thing?
All of the heroes of the Boston Marathon bombing are three-dimensional folks, with silliness and sadness of their own in spades. So are the victims, and it certainly behooves us, even more so, not to define them by a single incident. When we focus on the humanity of the people involved in a tragedy, we see it less as a footnote in history and more as what it is — a very bad thing that happened to all sorts of real people.
Years later, I wound up working in Boston at an outdoor retail shop. There was a woman who came in often with one of the sweetest dogs I had ever met. I forgot the breed, just like I forget her name, but it was the kind of dog that brought joy to everyone it met. There was one just like it at another shop I worked at later on. It didn’t matter your age, race, religion, or creed — you saw this dog and your face lit up in an instant.
The woman had a prosthetic leg below the knee, and I found out one day that she had lost it in the attack. The dog, who seemed to cure sadness in an instant, was in fact trained to do just that — it was her support dog.
When I heard her story, I wasn’t just sad for the pain and sadness she had experienced that day, I was also sad for the pain and sadness she probably experienced every day since. When people, people like me, found out how it happened. When people gave her that face.
You know the face — the one that says “I’m so sorry for what happened to you.” The kind of face that shifts the entire dynamic of a conversation, that sends you back to the victimhood you’ve been trying to escape. You know the face. You hate the face.
And I’d rather not see her as a victim, or a hero, a symbol, or any of those things. I’d rather see her as the nice woman who came into our store every now and then. The woman with a life full of joy and tragedy like any other. The woman who had a permanent reminder of a very bad day, but also had the wonderful dog that made sadness go away.
The first time I heard Peter Sagal’s story about the Boston Marathon bombings, I laughed out loud. My brother had heard it on the radio, and he was telling us all around the dinner table. He was inspired by it, and thought we would be too. And everyone was. Except me, who was laughing.
I couldn’t help myself — it was literally the exact opposite of my story. The similarities were uncanny, and the differences were hilarious. He was guiding a runner, I was guiding a runner. His runner got tired, my runner got tired. He told his runner he could gut it out through the pain, I told my runner he could chill out, no big deal. They arrived at the finish line a few minutes before the bombs, and we were just a few minutes behind.
So even though I hadn’t pushed my pal through the pain, the end result was the same. We survived, so my lesson had to be as good as his, right? “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” has a great ring to it, but apparently “If you’re going through hell, just try and take it easy and have a good time” is just as valid. Inspiring! Where’s my Ted Talk?
For a long time, I kept this lesson as a joke. But as the ten-year anniversary of the attacks approached, I began to think that it wasn’t so bad a lesson. From everything I’ve heard, hell does indeed suck, and getting through it is probably no cakewalk. Give 100% effort every day getting through hell and you’ll probably burn out pretty quickly. Or depending on where you step, burn up pretty quickly.
So why not take it easy as you go through hell? See if the lava pool has a swim-up bar. Pretend the Iron Maiden is just really intense acupuncture therapy. Try and develop a sadomasochism fetish to make all that whipping feel like heaven.
Those are jokes obviously. (Unless you’re into whipping. No kink-shaming here.) But I do believe that it doesn’t matter what pace you get through hell, so long as you keep going. Bobby and I were saved by walking it out, while Peter Sagal and his guy were saved by gutting it out. We had the important thing in common, though — we had made it through hell.
Although to be honest, I don’t think about that day too often (only when the opportunity for appropriately timed anniversary essays arises). I’m certainly guilty of using it as a factoid, sharing my proximity to the explosions as an interesting point of conversation rather than something I keep down in the dark parts of myself. As we learned later, the rest of us runners weren’t in much grave danger. I didn’t have family watching from the grandstands. My dad didn’t run towards the danger. (Which is probably for the best. He’s in insurance.)
Bobby lived with that day, and that hell, for years. He ran a marathon on every continent in the years afterward, trying to heal and make sense of the fear he had felt that day. He wrote about it in his book, “Running Wild,” which I swear I’m not being paid to promote. In fact, I’ve literally only read the part I’m in, but my sister says the rest is good.
Book or no book, I could never understand Bobby’s hell. But I know that he’s helped me through some hells of my own, and that a lot of wonderful experiences and wonderful people have come out of his adventures. Hell is complicated, just like people are complicated, and maybe lessons about it aren’t so simple. Life is bad a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s truly hell. But there may still be some good, even if it’s just a little. Even if it’s just flowers on a sunny day.
If you’re going through hell, you should keep going. No arguments here, Mr. Sagal. But don’t be afraid to do it at your own pace, and don’t be afraid to look for the good in whatever hell you currently reside. If it has flowers, stop and smell ’em. If it has a doggo, go play some fetch. If it has a massage chair, take a seat. And if there’s a crowd around you, you know what to do.
Life is hard, and we have to keep going, even when tragedy strikes. But it doesn’t have to be hell. And whether we’re encouraging each other to run through the pain or take a well-deserved break, it won’t be hell if we’re there together.
