Barbara Haddock Taylor, Baltimore Sun
Professor and Vice Dean for Education at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Ran Boston Marathon and is running half marathon in Baltimore. "We're riding back on the [metro] and somebody says, 'There's been an explosion near the finish line.' I can tell you, you've never seen so many people whip their cell phones out more quickly and start looking, whether it was Twitter or CNN or whatever, just to get some idea of what had been happening." "A lot of the reaction afterward was that this was the wrong group to mess with. Especially marathon runners. Marathon runners are people who don¿t give up easily, who aren't deterred by things, no matter what their friends or family say. It's kind of like, if you mess with our sport, even more of us will [run]."
Mother of two from Cleveland ran Boston Marathon, also running Baltimore Marathon. "We were in the middle of a conversation and we could feel the actual explosion. It was so strange because it got so silent. All those people and it just got silent." "We were kind of numb and still and disbelief, and it took two days to think about all of these what-ifs. What if I had stopped to walk in the race and I was a bit slower? What if they had decided to do the explosions an hour sooner? What if so and so had been at the finish line? You go through that whole thing. You think about the families that were impacted so much more severely than we were. "When did I stop thinking about it? You know what, I probably haven't."
The Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, which killed three and injured hundreds, shook the running community. The Baltimore Running Festival, which takes place this weekend, is one of the first large-city marathons to occur since Boston, giving runners a chance to reflect on that day and how it affected their outlook of the sport. -- Nick Fouriezos