Palo Alto Resident: Boston Marathon Bombings Were 'Chaotic'

Running the Boston Marathon was on Bill Zaslow’s bucket list since he was a little boy.

The Palo Alto resident, 41, got to cross it off his list when he ran the marathon for the first time with friends in 2011.

“Doing the race was better than anything I could have ever imagined,” Zaslow said.

Monday’s race would be his second finish of the historic event.

But the Boston native never made it across the finish line.

Instead, at about mile 24, he recalled to Patch Tuesday, he was about to run a little stretch at an underpass when all of a sudden “people were running in the wrong direction towards me crying, yelling there was a bombing – there were runners and kids.”

In disbelief, Zaslow kept running but he was stopped nearing mile 25 of the course.

“A girl asked me if there was a bombing -- I couldn’t process what she was saying,” he said.

“It was chaotic -- people were crying. There must be people dead, I kept thinking. It went from a great, amazing day to utter terror as I’m walking to the finish.”

This year, Zaslow ran the race for Massachusetts-based charity Housing Families, an organization that works to end family homelessness by providing safe, temporary shelter and quality affordable housing to homeless and at-risk families.

He was running the race by himself, but his friend Linda Mele of Charlestown, Mass. met him at mile 22, planning to run the last 4 miles with him.

When they were forced to turn away from the finish line, they didn’t know where to go or what to do.

“I didn’t have my phone or backpack – I was freezing,” he said.

Zaslow and his friend couldn’t get a cab and public transit was not running, so they started walking – finally stopping at a bar near Fenway Park where they watched the coverage on TV.

A bar employee gave Zaslow a sweatshirt. “Everyone was so nice,” Zaslow said.

It was “just chaos” in the whole area over the next few hours.

As evening fell, the two friends finally caught a cab back to Zaslow’s hotel.

And on Tuesday, Zaslow returned to downtown Boston to retrieve his backpack.

"You could see people were still feeling very uncomfortable. The mood here is … people are very devastated,” he said.

Zaslow said he had mixed emotions. “I got my bag. The guy put the medal around my neck... but I didn’t even really finish the race.”

Zaslow said five tanks occupied Boston Commons Tuesday and military personnel were everywhere.

Zaslow, a senior vice president for a major financial firm in Menlo Park, will head back to Palo Alto this weekend.

He’s not sure if he will run the Boston Marathon next year.

I don’t know if I'd run it again – even though I love the race," he said with a sadness in his voice. "Maybe I'd go to a bar down the street and just watch it on TV."

When Zaslow finally got his cell phone back, he had 63 texts, tons of emails and Facebook messages asking if he was OK.

To one friend, he wrote, “It was the scariest and wide range of emotions I have ever experienced. I am safe though and very thankful.”