“I was living in Brazil, and people were saying, ‘Oh, but my dream is running the Boston Marathon,’” Samary said. “So I had the goal of one time in my life running the Boston Marathon. The Boston Marathon is like the Holy Grail of everyone that runs.”
“The biggest obstacle was mentalizing something that was so far away because I was making choices that would benefit me in the long term,” Pardo said. “So it forced me to become more intentional with my time in the short term for a long-term goal, which is a lesson that I learned that I really liked.”
“I would say I have been a runner without being a runner,” Knous said. “I’ve always been that person on the soccer team that could run for days, and I have enjoyed running my whole life—we’re the family who does 5Ks on major holidays. … I’ve grown up loving it as an outlet, something away from soccer.”
“I’ve wanted to run the marathon as a BC student since I came to BC,” Sandifer said. “Finally getting that experience was really cool. The people I wanted to be out there watching me were there, so it meant a lot.”
“When I started to come down Comm Ave. after Linden Lane, it was just the coolest experience seeing all my friends and hearing him scream, and it totally got me through the last bit of the marathon,” Murphy said. “So that was totally the hardest part but seeing them just rejuvenated me.”
“I think being a BC student is probably the best way to run the Boston Marathon,” Craycraft said. “There’s so many people yelling out on the course, you know, cheering for BC or for the Eagles, and I couldn’t be more grateful or more proud to wear the BC jersey while running the course. It’s super special.”
“I ran a really good half marathon [in Newport], and then a few weeks later, I did the Cambridge Half Marathon with some BC friends, too,” said Flatley. “And so, by that point, I started to feel like I knew that the next step was the marathon.”
“I came to Boston to run the marathon in college, and I just fell in love with the city,” Bush said. “It’s hard to come to Boston as a runner and not just fall in love with the Boston area. I remember having a thought seven years ago of ‘Oh my gosh, I love this place. I want to live here someday.’”
“The general idea of going through a hard time and pushing through it and knowing that with enough hard work, you can hopefully make it out on the other side, definitely helps me with school and job searching,” Fagan said. “It might be tough now, but if you just push through it and keep working, hopefully you can make it through.”
“I ran in honor and memory of my father because he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2005,” she said. “It really meant a lot to me to run in honor of him and raise money for other cancer patients.”
