Local residents competing in Boston Marathon describe scene
Karen Harr, 47, of Canonsburg, had just finished running her 14th marathon. She had just crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon and was leaving a medical tent when she heard a loud explosion directly behind her.
“As you can imagine, at the end of the marathon, it’s just a sea of humanity, all moving in one direction,” Harr said. “I heard an explosion that happened behind me, so I turned around, and it sounded so much like a cannon at civil war re-enactment. There was all this smoke, very surreal. Everyone turned, but no one know what to make of it.”
Harr is a veteran of the Boston Marathon. The 2013 race was her fourth time tackling the 26.2-mile course. But the scene of eerie confusion she described was unlike anything she had experienced.
“It’s Patriots’ Day, so I thought, ‘It has to be a cannon.’ But why would they fire it at the finish line like that? That would scare the runners,” Harr said.
After the second explosion, Harr made her way to the side of the roadway to let emergency personnel navigate and to stay out of the way of any panicked onlookers in case of a stampede. She said organizers and police did a good job of keeping people calm.
“The Boston Marathon is so well organized, it’s not fair to say it was chaos,” Harr said. “But it just wasn’t like every other year. You couldn’t go places you could go in the past. There were sirens everywhere. And then I called my boss to tell him I was OK, and suddenly the phones were dead.”
Harr, the director of running groups for Upper St. Clair store Fleet Feet Sports, made her way to a nearby company-sponsored event held in the conference center of a nearby hotel. She was able to rest there until trains were back in operation and could take her to her hotel.
Fellow runner Sarah Olesky described her first Boston Marathon experience as a plunge from an ecstatic high into devastating horror.
“Our hotel is a safe point, like a half block from finish line,” said Olesky, of South Park. “Families were reuniting here. I felt so scared for the dads looking for their families and the international runners trying to reach their families because the phones and Internet were down.”
Olesky, 23, is a recent graduate of Slippery Rock University, where she played soccer and softball and ran on the cross country team. She said finishing the Boston Marathon was a lifelong ambition.
“It’s seriously making me tear up thinking that a finish line that brought me so much happiness was destroyed and replaced with terror 40 minutes later,” Olesky said.
Olesky had already finished the race and had headed to her nearby hotel room to shower when the explosion occurred. She crossed the finish line with a time of 3:28:03, and the bomb went off about the 4:09:00 mark of the race.
Already safe in her room with her mother, who had traveled with her to the event, Olesky was spared the anguish of trying to find loved ones during the hectic hours after the blast. She was able to establish contact with a group of runners who were also Slippery Rock alumnae via text message before cellular communication was lost later in the evening.
Her father, Joe Olesky, said he was in Washington for a work appointment at the time of the attack.
“I had an inkling she was all right,” Joe Olesky said, “because I had talked to my wife right about 2 p.m., and she said she ran a really good time and was finished.”
Thankful his daughter was unharmed, he said his heart went out to all the families who were affected by the tragedy.
“It’s a shame what happened,” the elder Olesky said. “That stuff shouldn’t happen. Only God knows who did this, but it was a heinous act.”