Colleen Keilty has mapped out parts of the Boston Marathon course more than a dozen times to help her train for this year’s marathon. But no matter how many times she runs it, she breaks down in tears when she approaches the Boylston Street area.

“I don’t even know necessarily what I’m feeling, kind of like I still can’t believe that happened and I know I’m super lucky that I can be running,” said Keilty, who graduated from Syracuse University in 2009.

April 15, 2014 marked the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people and left more than 260 others injured.On Monday, Keilty will be one of many members of the SU community running in this year’s marathon to support runners and the city of Boston.    

Colleen Terry ’87, Jessica Boardman ’09 and Bridget Hughes, a case manager at the SU Abroad office, will also experience the emotional run. Although last year’s attack affected each of them differently, they all know their memories from last year and the desire to support the Boston community will push them across the finish line.

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Keilty and her parents had just stepped into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Boylston Street to meet up with her older brother so they could watch his girlfriend, Steph, finish the race. Just when they found Keilty’s brother, they heard a loud explosion from outside.

Everyone began yelling and her brother grabbed Keilty and her parents. They headed out a back entrance, she said. Steph was stopped on the course with other runners about a mile away from the finish line uninjured. They spent the day “sheltered in place” at the Prudential Center to stay safe because police thought that more bombs might go off.

“Literally one minute later or earlier and it could have been completely different,” Keilty said. “Someone was looking out for us that day.”

Before last year, Keilty had never run a marathon, but it was always on her list of things to accomplish. When she saw that the Boston Athletic Association was having a contest for invitations to race this year, she entered.

The contest required applicants to write a 500-word piece on how last year’s marathon emotionally affected them. About 1,500 people applied and she was one of 400 people to receive an invitation, she said.

Keilty wrote about her experiences and the emotions she felt during last year’s run. Today, she realizes that she could have been injured or killed if she did anything differently.

“I definitely think about why I’m running,” she said.

She will be running with her brother and his girlfriend Steph in this year’s race. Her brother might cruise ahead, she said, but she and Steph are going to cross the finish line on Boylston together.

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Colleen Terry would have been crossing the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year at the time of the first explosion. She planned to finish in a little more than four hours, which would have put her at the finish line when the first bomb went off.

Terry qualified for the Boston Marathon after running the Berlin Marathon while she was living in Germany in 2010. She ran the Boston Marathon in 2002 on a charity team — which allows runners of all levels to participate as long as they raise money for a cause — but she wanted to run the marathon as a qualified runner.

“Your goal as a runner is always to qualify for the Boston marathon,” Terry said.  “I wanted to run as a qualified runner.”

Her husband convinced her not to go because they were living in Germany and it would have been expensive to fly to Boston. On the day of the marathon, Terry thanked him as they sat in her home in Germany, watching the events unfold on TV.

“All I could think of was ‘Wow I was lucky that I wasn’t there,’” Terry said.

Terry knew that she would run the marathon this year even if she didn’t run as a qualified runner. She is running on the Boston Children’s Hospital charity team in honor of a friend’s daughter who survived stage-four neuroblastoma — a childhood cancer that starts in nerve cells and spreads tumors throughout the body.

She movedto Boston in August and endured tough training in the cold, snowy winter with a sciatic nerve injury that put pressure and pain on her back. Running for a cause kept her motivated during her training, and she knows that on Marathon Monday, she will run for another cause as well.

“We’re a community of runners, a community of Bostonians, a community of supporters,” she said. “This marathon is what we do and you aren’t going to take this away from us.”

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Bridget Hughes approached the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year with a face that clearly showed she was exhausted. She heard a woman cheering for her.

“Keep going! You’re almost there,” the woman yelled. Hughes looked over at the woman and continued running through the finish line.

A little while later, Hughes, a case manager at SU Abroad, headed out of Boston in a car. She noticed several police cars passing in the other direction, but didn’t think anything of it.

She realized something tragic happened when she began receiving text messages from friends asking if she was safe. After hearing about the explosions near the finish line, she could only wonder if the woman who cheered her on was safe.

While training for this year’s marathon, Hughes endured the harsh Syracuse winter, but it made her realize that she is lucky to have made it through last year’s race unharmed and able to run again.

“The running community is strong,” she said. “What happened isn’t going to get in the way of our sense of community and love of the sport.”

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Jessica Boardman, a 2009 alumna, made sure she passed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on each run to give her a boost of motivation. Sean Collier, the MIT police officer who was killed last year, was one of Boardman’s friends.

“What happened last year is so awful and having been personally affected from losing a friend definitely keeps me going,” she said.

Boardman has never run a full marathon, but she was given an invitation to run in this year’s marathon since she was personally affected by last year’s race. She’s running on Team Collier Strong, which is fundraising for two causes: the Officer Sean Collier Self Sponsor Scholarship, which will send awardees through the Lowell Police Academy, and The Hole in the Wall Gang, which provides summer camp experiences to seriously ill children and their families, according to the Team Collier Strong website.

Boardman knows that the race will be a very emotional and meaningful experience for her, especially since she grew up in Boston.

“I’m so grateful to be able to participate and remember and honor those who were affected by the tragedy,” she said. “I’m so grateful to be a part of this run.”

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For members of the SU community and the city as a whole, finishing the race is a way of overcoming last year’s attack.

As she crosses the finish line on Monday, Keilty may be crying, but partly because she is proud to help the city and runners take their race back.

Said Keilty: “What happened last year isn’t going to stop us.”

Published on April 21, 2014 at 12:38 am

Contact Jocelyn: jdelaney@syr.edu