So I was right on Hereford when they pretty much stopped us; we didn’t know what was going on. From my perspective it sounded like when you hear a large truck that backfires, that’s kind of what it sounded like to us. They weren’t telling us anything. We were just literally stopped there for, I would say, I don’t know, time is hard to reflect on at this point, it seemed like twenty minutes. I told my friend she had to go back, she needed to get out of there, she needed to kind of go back and tell our friends, and we heard that there might be a bombing, there might be suspects on the loose, we were hearing lots of different things. So then they told us to leave the scene. As you can imagine, they jammed all the cell service, so no one could really get in contact with each other. We kept trying to call my mom. We walked all the way around, I’m not sure how familiar you are with Boston, but around the Charles River there’s all these paths, so we tried to cut over away from the road along the Charles to then cut back in past the finish line to find my mom because Dana Farber had a meeting spot at the Boston Marriot Hotel. In my delusional mind, I figured we would meet there. Well, obviously we couldn’t get in there. It’s been an hour, I’ve already been running for four hours, limping beyond belief, so injured, so cold in my sweat, they basically told me to route back and walk back to my apartment which was on the Brookline-Boston line, about two miles back. So we walked back. It was, it still is, a very surreal thing to talk about, it doesn’t seem like it happened. It was a very, very weird time, and running in the subsequent year was both cathartic and very nerve wracking, but I think that’s something that I needed to do to move past that day.
Mallory Mason Sakats is the co-owner of ENT Billing, a medical billing company in Worcester, MA. In this interview she describes mentors that assisted her along her educational and career path, the pros and cons of being a business owner, and how she navigates balancing work and motherhood as a new mother. She also shares her firsthand experience of being a marathon runner in the 2013 Boston Marathon, the year of the Boston Marathon Bombing. She describes the confusion of being stopped just around the corner from the explosion, the exhaustion of having to walk several miles home after running many miles, and the worry from not being in contact with her mother who viewed the explosion from the grandstands. She overcame any lingering fear by running the Boston Marathon the following year.