A community looking to provide strength and a community wanting to grow, that’s what stood out most to the Greater Boston area runners during the last 100 days, said John Raveling, the manager of Lexington’s Greater Boston Running Company store.
On April 16 as the store opened for business – for the first time since the terrorist attacks on Boylston Street the day before – Raveling said customers started calling in. They were wondering if staff members had heard whether their friends and relatives were unscathed or if the worst had happened.
“People usually call the store after a marathon to find out how their loved ones did, but this year they were looking for more serious answers. They wanted to know how everybody was,” Raveling said.
In addition to being concerned about the victims of the bombings, Raveling had concerns based on his experience following the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School. He worried people would be forever stuck in the negative experience, unable to move on.
At the time he owned a running store in Littleton, Colo., just miles away from the school where two high school seniors killed 14 people and injured 21 with guns, knives and homemade bombs.
In the days following the marathon bombing, customers entered the store in a daze and the main question on their minds appeared to Raveling to be: What would come out of the experience? Raveling soon saw the runners answering their own questions and turning into an energized force determined to find a way to heal the community.
He felt running would create a solidarity among his customers and told them to continue their pursuit of race participation.
“What some people don’t realize is that almost every race runners participate in is for a good cause and this just solidifies the community. People wanted to know what they could do make things better, what they could do to change things,” said Raveling, who has worked at the store for a year. “It was like a light switch – people went from downtrodden to inspired.”
He, like many runners, heard stories from friends and coworkers at the site of the bombs in the minutes before the explosions. The experiences, the stories, unified the running communities, not just in Massachusetts, but also across the country, citing the actions of someone he knows in Colorado.
“A high school student who had no personal connection to the bombings, raised a few hundred dollars for The One Fund. It was really incredible,” he said.
To distinguish themselves and help out with donations to The One Fund, Greater Boston Running Company designed its own blue and yellow T-shirts after the marathon. The T-shirts combine the store’s name with the popular Boston Strong logo and reads: “Nothing Greater than Boston Running Strong.”
But most people weren’t entering the store to purchase Boston Strong merchandise. Raveling said he heard from people who never entered the store before. He recalls a woman and her husband, self-described socialites who have never run before, coming in and determined to run. They were inspired by the marathoners and wanted to join the effort to strengthen the community.
“Overall, it think the experience galvanized us,” he said. “All the bombing did was make us stronger.”
Stronger to the point that he predicts next year’s Boston Marathon will be flooded with entries. The already popular event will have to make extra accommodations for inspired runners, ready to show support for the victims of the community.
“I don’t know how [the organizers] are going to handle it,” he said.