Nowhere to run

A friend texted me yesterday afternoon: Did you hear about the explosions in Boston?

For someone who has run distance races in the distant past (not a marathon … yet), I'm ashamed to say I'd forgotten yesterday was the Boston Marathon.

[Aside: Runner's World is now delivered silently to my Nook and I have not read a word of any issue in a couple of months. Nor have I read any printed magazines in a couple of months. Perhaps I should stop subscribing to magazines. The reason I mention this is because they always have a big run-up-to-Boston issue. Which I missed.]

I stayed glued to the news until mid-evening, when I just couldn't take the senselessness of it any longer.

It wasn't just the senselessness of setting off bombs at the finish line of a marathon in Boston on Patriot's Day. It also was the senselessness of parsing the President's remarks, the guessing and second-guessing who might be responsible, the inaccurate reporting, the conjecture.

My last thought last night, and my first this morning, is of the – irony isn't the right word, but I can't think of one right now – of a situation in which athletes and families who support them and cheer them on and help them train, are cut down at the end, missing limbs, maimed, injured, dead.

If this were Syria or Lebanon or Israel or Palestine or Jordan or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or [insert name of Middle Eastern country here], they wouldn't have cut into regular programming to follow a breaking news story of a couple of bombs going off in a major city. That happens almost daily in [insert name of Middle Eastern country here]. It would be like stopping the normal broadcast line-up to follow a car wreck here in North America.

But this is North America, the United States of America, where setting off bombs in cities rarely happens. The 24/7 news cycle dictates that the networks will fill the air with something. The sponsors are paying for it, after all. One reporter said all those thousands of runners "signed up" to run the Boston Marathon. Well, I guess technically she's right. But if they didn't qualify for it by finishing a previous marathon in a specified time, then they raised a bunch of money for charity. That's how you get into Boston. You don't just pay your fee and pick up your number.

I'm feeling cynical this morning. And angry. And incredibly, awfully sad. Kind of like I did only a few short months ago, watching the news from Connecticut. I'm feeling helpless, discouraged, disheartened.

I'm feeling like there's nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.