Marathon Runner: 'I Have to Go Back'

It took him until Wednesday morning to really start processing the horrors of Monday afternoon when two bombs detonated at the finish line of the Boston Marathon—but Joseph Rotondo already knows he wants to head right back next year.

“As a running community, people are saddened, but also angry,” said Rotondo, a Warren resident who owns Rotondo Associates, a computer business on Route 22 in Bridgewater. “It’s supposed to be a happy day.”

“But I have to go back, I have to do it again,” he added.

Rotondo was at the 24-mile mark of his first ever Boston Marathon, and the 25th marathon in his life, when everything changed Monday.

“I run marathons, and I try to do four to six a year,” he said. “Boston in the running community is the Super Bowl of marathons.”

Flying up there with his wife, Noreen, and two twin daughters, Rotondo was prepared to run on behalf of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

“Both of my parents passed away from cancer-related illnesses in the span of two weeks last year,” he said. “I thought, let me run the Boston Marathon and do it for charity.”

Rotondo said he and his family were staying at the Courtyard Marriott, although they had tried to get rooms in the one in Copley Square, where the headquarters was for the marathon. In retrospect, he said, he is thankful the hotel was all sold out.

But Rotondo began the race, and as soon as he hit mile 24, he and his fellow runners began being pulled off the road and sent to run on the sidewalk. He said he heard talk of an explosion, but nothing yet about there being bombs.

At that point, Rotondo said, he was supposed to meet his family in a meeting place set up by Dana-Farber around mile 25, and he was looking forward to it.

But at about mile 24.75, Rotondo said, police informed them that the marathon was over.

“Someone had a cell phone and at that point she showed it to me,” he said. “It said distinctly that bomb blasts had gone off at the marathon. Once we saw that, a few people started to put everything together.”

With no cell service for about an hour, Rotondo said he tried to find and contact his family and started walking around the area because he was not allowed near Copley Square.

Finally, Rotondo said, he got in touch with one of his daughters, who said they were all safe at the Copley Square hotel—and then 30 minutes later, the hotel was evacuated because of a bomb that fortunately never detonated.

Rotondo eventually met up with his family at their hotel.

“I just walked around until I found a way to get there,” he said. “It took me two hours because everything was all blocked and they wouldn’t let us through the area.”

Rotondo said it was difficult to absorb everything that had happened in that afternoon, and even Tuesday, before his family flew home.

“Even yesterday, we got up and walked around, and there were armed policemen with machine guns and the National Guard all over,” he said. “There was a heavy presence of police and military, and there was no way we were going to get a nice happy day.”

But once he and his family had returned home, and prepared to go to work and school, Rotondo said he really began to understand the enormity of what had happened.

“If you think about it and say the hotel they were in, they found a bomb, what are the chances of that?” he said. “Luckily it didn’t go off, but it took to today to really absorb it all and see how fortunate we all were.”

And Rotondo said having some of the best medical staff on hand because of the marathon really helped save lives in the disaster.

“If it had not been a marathon, there would have been more fatalities because they had the best of the best,” he said. “It was very methodical, and I really have to give them so much credit, they saved so many lives.”

But Rotondo said this reported act of terrorism will not stop him, or the rest of the running community, from coming back.

The Boston Marathon is such an elite event, Rotondo said, that people were buying jackets and other memorabilia. And after the bombs, he said, people who had run in previous marathons began donning their jackets as well.

But when he boarded the plane to return to New Jersey, Rotondo said, he met another man also wearing a Boston Marathon jacket.

“He looked at me, and said, ‘you coming back?’” Rotondo said. “I said I have to.”

Rotondo said he knows there is no doubt among the running community that they will return, and there will be a better ending to the marathon.

“Something major has been taken from us, not just with this race,” he said. “Every other will have major security, and they took the innocence away from this type of event.”

“But we can’t leave there with that image in our minds,” he added. “It has to end with a happy ending, even if that takes next year or the year after that.”