Flashes of Panic

When I first heard, I wanted to say something to someone, but I didn’t know who, or what. We’ve talked a lot, in the last day or so, about odds; how, among the hundreds of thousands of people who run marathons every year, there’s bound to be a fatality or two during the races. We don’t talk about how it’s not usually somebody whose name you know, someone you may have talked to once or twice in the course of his career. For the other finishers, someone they’d trained with, shared coaches with, raced dozens of times. They (we) knew his brother(s), his wife, his coaches.

We all want to say something, but we really don’t know what to say.

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