Where the brain goes...

I suppose you could say that this blog is a few days in the making. It's been stirring around in my head since Monday evening, and I'm finally getting around to sitting down to write it.

It was Monday afternoon and I was in the office because I was making sure I spent time packing for our office move at the end of the week. I had eaten lunch and wanted to give it time to settle, but got distracted by preparing for our membership meeting, packing and working on some insurance stuff.

Laura in my office saw it before I did - there had been a bombing at the Boston Marathon.

And in the next few minutes, more information showed up on the news sites. A photo of a gentleman on the ground with policemen in front of him. A video of the finish line when one of the bombs went off. News reports with the same information over and over.

My mind first went to two people that I knew from Team in Training who were running Boston this year. I went to the marathon website and put their names in, seeing that they had both checked in at 40K, but had not finished. They are both ok.

I got angry. Angry that it wasn't even safe to run anymore. I got sad. Sad that people had been injured and died - for what? Sad that runners who may have had one shot at Boston may not have been able to finish, or that their race now had this dark cloud over it.

Eventually, I wasn't sure what to do, and decided to go do my two mile run. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. So I went and ran outside downtown.

At first I wasn't so sure why this seemed to hit me so hard. Then I remembered - I was somewhat a part of this whole running community now. It didn't matter how fast or slow I was - I run. And throughout the week, this incident has been weighing heavily on my mind and I've been watching it closely.

I'm running a huge half marathon event in less than a week. It's an inaugural event in Washington, D.C.

This is the biggest event I've ever run.

This added to all the other emotional stuff attached to this race (raising money to help fight cancer, overcoming a hurdle and do something I NEVER thought I would do). It feels like whoever did this intruded into a part of my life.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit scared in the back of my mind. I'm running this race with thousands of others, in a city I've never been. We had the discussion on our "Everything You Need to Know" call tonight about whether there will be bag drops now (as far as we know, the answer is yes).

Could something happen? Yes. But it can happen anywhere, as the events at the Boston Marathon have reminded us.

Does that mean we should avoid doing things? No. The odds of things like this happening are small. If we don't go out and do things or avoid taking risks, what kind of life would we have?

I know when I run my race next week, my brain will be all over the place. It will be with my legs that will be in pain, it will be with people battling cancer, it will be with my aunt that we lost to cancer. It will drift to a meditative state and it will just listen to my breath. It will be a tourist in D.C. and take photos of various things during the race. My brain will drift to all of you who helped me reach an amazing goal to help others.

And it will no doubt be with Boston, its people, the runners and the heroes.