Runner Avoids Tragedy at the Boston Marathon

Kathy Borsuk was fighting exhaustion as she approached the final leg of the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Borsuk, a Lawrenceville resident who works in Hillsborough, said she was tired, but determined to finish the race as she neared the 25th mile of the marathon, hoping to reach the finish line where her husband and two young children were waiting. She began to notice that things didn't seem quite right at around 3 p.m.

"As I was running, I saw ... a caravan of vehicles blaring down the course," Borsuk said. "All the runners were looking around and we thought, okay what's going on here, but we just kept running. I thought there was a fire or something after seeing fire trucks. It was slight chaos, but I really wasn't thinking clearly because I was so tired. It was the last leg and I just wanted to finish, but I can't really say my brain was functioning properly."

It was by chance that Borsuk even found herself in Boston for the marathon at all. Borsuk, who works as a massage therapist at Hillsborough Massage Therapy, won one of three bids to run the race as a representative for the Massage Therapy Foundation. It would be her first attempt at running a marathon.

"I really started running in December of 2011. I had a resolution to run one 5k a week, so I threw my name into the hat and I won a chance to run the Boston Marathon," she said. "I was so excited and happy to run and raise awareness for my profession. I didn't know what to expect, I was just happy to be there. No goals or expectations, just an experience I thought that I had to have."

As her family, friends and charity representatives were gathered in the VIP section near the finish line, Borsuk kept chugging along, moving closer toward the final stretch. It was then that she found out the unimaginable.

"I kept seeing runners getting on their cell phones. People were crying," she said. "At about the 25th mile, they put up barricades and told people to make a right, where there was this bottleneck of people. I was trying to get around them when I heard a police officer say the marathon is over. Then he said there was an explosion at the bleachers."

Borsuk had no idea of the severity of the explosions, with little to no information about the attack that had just occurred. Her thoughts immediately turned to her family.

"I thought are people injured? Are they dead? My mind switched to my family and friends," she said. "A bunch of us were confused and tired. I was walking up a hill when I happened to hear my husband scream my name, and there he was with my kids. My husband was a block away from the explosions. The crowd was so big near the finish line, so he went further back on the course with my kids so they could see me. I thought oh my god, what about the rest of the people there with us. We kind of walked around aimlessly."

Borsuk soon found other spectators with VIP passes for the bleachers and found out they had been evacuated. She went on Facebook and found out that luckily, her friends made it out uninjured, just a short distance away from the explosions.

"One of my friends was just 50 yards from the second explosion," she said. "They weren't injured, but they're trying to work through what they experienced. We're all working through the emotions of that day. People are kind of walking on eggshells with us and don't know what to say."

Even in the midst of chaos, as the worst of human nature rocked Boston to its core, Borsuk witnessed examples of the very best of human nature come to the forefront.

"There were so many runners gathered in parking lots of gas stations and a Best Buy. Nobody knew what to do," she said. "But people in and around Boston stopped to help and give everybody directions. Other people offered runners a ride back to their hotels. Others were handing out sweatshirts. Others were giving people food."

After hopping on a train and arriving back at her hotel in Newton, Borsuk experienced on TV the gravity of the disaster she had narrowly missed.

"It was hard to see. I heard what happened, but when I saw how much panic there was I couldn't watch it," she said. "I didn't want my kids to see anything more. I still have a hard time being so close to what happened. Thank goodness I was a slow runner."

Despite avoiding the devastation the terror attacks wreaked on the spectators at the Boston Marathon by a simple twist of fate, Borsuk said she wouldn't hesitate to return for the event next year.

"Of course I would run it again and I fully plan on going back," she said. "It was such a terrbile tragedy. My heart goes out to all the families and the people who were injured. At the same time, bad things happen and good things happen. You have to keep going. I'm already signed up for another marathon and I will get back to Boston."