On Monday, Keith Pellerin ran his ninth consecutive—and last—Boston Marathon.
And “I’ve never had a day like I had yesterday,” said Pellerin, a Northborough resident who works at Rich Allen’s PR Running store in the Westborough Shopping Center.
People wanted to know that Pellerin was safe following the Boston Marathon tragedy.
“I had phone calls and texts from people I haven’t talked to in five years," said Pellerin. "As a matter of fact, I had voicemails and texts from people I don’t even like.”
“You don’t hear from somebody for three or four years, and then you get a text: ‘Hey, we just hope you’re okay.’ That’s all cool.”
Pellerin said he was sitting in his Copley Marriott hotel room with six or seven members of the Wampanoag Road Runners running club “when my wife called to let us know that she had just heard two bombs went off.”
“We hadn’t heard anything yet," he said. "It hadn’t even come on the television. It’s amazing. It was very similar I think to what happened in 1972 in Munich, when they locked everything down at the Olympics. Because in our hotel, we couldn’t leave. You just couldn’t budge. You had to stay right there on the floor. We were locked down.”
The lockdown lasted about four hours, until about 6:15 p.m. “and then we were able to get on our bus with security watching us and leave,” Pellerin said. “From our vantage point, we could see the finish area. But we had to stay there. We could only see fire trucks, ambulances and police cars everywhere. Whereas in years past you could see people going down Boylston, you couldn’t see anybody."
Pellerin said he anticipates “heightened security” at future Boston Marathons.
“But, I would like to partake in other ways, maybe watch or root somebody else on,” he said.
“Just a sad day. Very sad.”