Blast 'Emotionally Taking a Toll' on Local Runner

On a Tuesday that many usually spend healing their overexhausted bodies and expelling massive reserves of lactic acid from their aching muscles, many Seacoast residents were instead also trying to find ways to repair the traumatic emotional damage inflicted by two deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon.

Linda Desjardins, of Hampton, was 6/10s of a mile away from the finish line when the homemade devices exploded in the middle of a popular spectator gathering spot.

Had the day and 26.2-mile route not been warm and sunny, Desjardins, 65, said she wouldn't have fallen off her 4-hour, 15-minute pace. That pace would've placed Desjardins "right" at the finish line "when the explosion went off" — a thought Desjardins said, when coupled with reports about severed limbs and devastating injuries, had her feeling "like a zombie" Tuesday.

"It's just something you'd never imagine," said Desjardins, a college English professor. "I'm glad it was warm and my legs were cramping a bit. It slowed down my pace... If not for that I would've been at a much better pace, and it was fortuitous that I wasn't.

"A huge chunk of whatever innocence I had left got broken off yesterday. It was just blown away. I wasn't hurt physically, but emotionally it's taking a toll."

Desjardins was one of several runners from Hampton, North Hampton and the surrounding area to participate in Monday's marathon. Many more individuals with ties to the area were in Boston watching the marathon when the bombs went off around 3 p.m. Monday, and as of Tuesday morning no local residents had been reported missing or injured.

That doesn't mean the aftermath of the incident has been easy for locals, though. Desjardins, who wasn't able to get home until five hours after she stopped running, said she was "lying in bed tossing and turning" much of the night because she found it "hard to process what happened."

Talking about the incident has helped her so far — she's spent significant time contacting the concerned individuals who left her 27 phone messages and more than 140 e-mails and social media messages — as has the scene she witnessed unfolding along Commonwealth Avenue when Boston-area residents began pouring out of their apartments and businesses to help runners and spectators minutes after the blasts.

From offering food, water and a warm place to rest, to handing out trash bags and even the clothes off their backs to keep runners from catching hypothermia, these citizen responders, according to Desjardins, helped showed that there was far from a shortage of a good will despite the dark intentions harbored by the individual or individuals responsible for the bombs.

"There was not a person who wasn't willing to help," said Desjardins, whose spectating sister wasn't injured Monday despite being fairly close to the finish line near the time of the explosion. "There were all sorts of people coming out of apartments to [offer anything they could]. I was just amazing how helpful people were. Just amazing. I've seen so much kindness. That's the only thing that keeps your faith going, because it was a difficult day."

Desjardins said there is a "sick" irony to the fact that individuals lost their legs and other limbs while watching or running the race, and she said it made many fellow marathoners question Monday whether they'd ever run Boston or a large event ever again.

Even if measures can be taken to increase runners' sense of safety in subsequent events, Desjardins said it would be "impossible" for law enforcement to fully vet over 52 miles of sidewalk and over 500,000 people and their bags — especially since Desjardins said authorities were "everywhere" during the entire race and even "cleared the area" using dogs and special searches before the event started.

"It's probably too soon," said Desjardins about whether she'd run the Boston Marathon again, something she said friends of hers have already declared they would "never" do again. "I think everyone's trying to process it. You don't know. Yesterday I would've said, 'I'm never running Boston again.' You don't know how it's going to play out.

"I can’t comprehend [why this would happen]. This is not in America’s mentality — we don’t have that mindset. I hope we don’t have to adopt that mindset. I don’t want to be afraid to go to a public gathering."