WESTFIELD – Although efforts to contact all members of the local contingent of runners in the 117th Boston Marathon have not been entirely successful, it appears that all the local racers escaped physical injury resulting from the bombs which exploded near the finish line of the race yesterday afternoon.
Michael McCabe, a captain with the city’s police force and an avid distance runner for decades, said that he knows all the local runners who competed and said that he looked into their status and discovered none who had been injured.
McCabe said that he had finished the race, with a time of 3:49:24, and said that he believes the explosions occurred at about 4 hours and five minutes after the start.
He said that the race, the third Boston Marathon he has completed, took an unusual toll on his body and, when he heard the explosion, he was getting into a wheelchair at the corner of Clarendon and Boylston streets to go to the medical tent.
For the next three quarters of an hour, he said, he was lying down receiving intravenous fluids to combat dehydration and leg massages to help fluids circulate in his legs.
However, he said that when he recovered he found that his skills were not needed.
As a police officer, McCabe does have basic first aid training but there were obviously plenty of trained medical professionals in the area, he said, and his police skills and training were not needed either.
He said that the people he saw in the area were suffering from the shock of the event but said that the victims with serious injuries were taken directly to Massachusetts General Hospital.
The people in the medical tent were runners suffering from the normal effects of the race and, once he recovered, he spent the next hour reassuring the runners who were going through the dehydration and other effects of a long distance race he had just recovered from.
McCabe said that he had trained for the race with Emanuel Sardinha and they ran side-by-side.
He said that they finished the race with exactly the same time but said “of course, he finished ahead of me, again” but neither was directly affected by the blasts.
He said that their concern was for their families.
He said that he and Sardinha had not known if their loved ones had been at the finish line but eventually they found them “right where we told them to go” at the Boston Athletic Club.
McCabe said that, in addition to the deaths and injuries caused by the explosions, the disruption robbed runners of their accomplishments.
About half the field, he said, didn’t get to finish and those who did have been forgotten.
He cited local runner Jason Ayr, who performed extremely well but will probably not get the recognition he deserves.
“The kid finished 55th running against the best runners in the world,” he said. “That’s pretty astounding”
He also said that that Annie Parades finished very well, with a time of three hours and one minute for 173rd place in her division which puts her in the top percentile.
James Mulligan also finished well at 3:22:36, McCabe said, “but those stories won’t get told” he said.
McCabe also said that his time was a personal best for the Boston course.
Two other local runners, Ronald Gibbons and Gary Fitzgerald, running with the State Police team, are safe but did not finish due the blast.
Gary Gorman of West Springfield, running with the ‘Griffin’s Friends’ team from Baystate Medical Center finished about ten minutes before the bombs detonated and reports that, except for the confusion and concern before he was reunited with his team, was not directly affected by the blast.
Major Matthew Mutti of the 104th Fighter Group based at Barnes Airport, reports that seven airman had been dispatched to help with security and, when the emergency occurred, were utilized by the Boston Police and other agencies responding to the catastrophe.
A group of Westfield State University students who assisted with the start of the race were unaffected by the emergency.
