Four mornings a week, Mikayla Rose gets up before dawn, before her kids and hits the pavement. She runs and runs, sometimes as far as 30 kilometres before she gets home, returning to her daily routine and her three children.
“Every single morning when the alarm goes off, I think ‘No!’ I think about turning it off, and rolling over again. But I get up, and I go, and I never regret it,” Mikayla says. “I ran good times in both the Sydney and Melbourne marathons, which qualified me to race in last year’s Boston marathon.”
As the world’s oldest and most prestigious race, the Boston Marathon attracted more than 26,000 participants last year.
“Moments after the starting gun went off, I knew that running that race was going to be one of the best things I ever did. The atmosphere was electric, the sun was shining and I was just so, so happy to be there,” she says.
On the suggestion of a friend, Mikayla had tucked an Australian flag into her running singlet – a decision she says changed her experience of the race. “It was overwhelming to run that route. Despite being from another country, I was supported at every step, people cheering ‘Aussie!’ or ‘Great Britain!’ when they didn’t recognise our flag,” she says with a chuckle.
“The support was incredible. Every few paces someone was offering me orange quarters, another person was offering lollies, another some water. It was like the whole city was running with you.”
Mikayla ran a personal best, finishing the race in three hours and 17 minutes, collapsing in the arms of a stranger who finished at the same time. She suddenly felt freezing, as her fatigue started to take hold.
“My friends who had come over to support me– Megan and Michael – helped me up to our hotel room, which was pretty much right on the finish line. I was desperately cold, and wanted to have a shower before cheering on the other finishers,” she says.
The decision may have saved her life, or at the least prevented a catastrophic injury, as two pressure cooker bombs detonated just metres from her hotel building.
“I jumped in the shower, and then felt a massive, massive bang. My friend opened the bathroom door and told me it was a bomb… I just remember sitting down on the bed, my hair wrapped in a towel and my dressing gown, in disbelief,” she says.
“Our hotel went into lockdown pretty much immediately, so we turned on the television to see the news, and watched the chaos unfold from our fourth storey room.
“I remember thinking, ‘what’s that red powder all over the ground?’ – I thought it was some kind of coloured flour used at the finish line to celebrate – and then it slowly dawned on me that it was blood, blood everywhere.”
Three people were killed in the terror attacks, with 264 more injured. Dozens of victims required amputations. For Mikayla and her friends, pre-arranged travel plans meant they left the city the next day for New York.
“I felt incredibly sad. I was walking around in a daze. The trip was my first overseas since having children and all I wanted to do was get home to them,” she says.
“The day holds such mixed emotions for me – utter euphoria towards Boston for holding such a magnificent race – and total devastation at the attacks.”
Two days after the marathon, Mikayla booked her accommodation for this year’s race.
“I knew I had to give back something to the city which had given me so much joy,” she says. “This year I am going back not to chase another personal best, but to say thank you.”
