“It’s definitely a day I’ll never forget,” Grady said. “I felt a lot of love from people I did know and didn’t know.”

“There was no feeling after that, like running away from Mile 21 I was so happy that the last five miles felt like nothing,” O’Connell said. “Like I don’t remember them at all.”

“Once you get over [Heartbreak Hill] and … you see the place that you’ve been over the last four years—it just kind of was a sigh of relief,” Kacha said. “Honestly, I can’t even put into words how amazing it was to kind of just see all the people that I’ve spent my entire four years here with just there supporting me.”

“[I] wanted to stay healthy while doing something for myself,” she said. “No one cares how far or how fast I run. It is something I do for me.”

“I … boxed out an area for myself, so I could high five people,” he said. “I just came down Comm. Ave, just like high fiving everyone on the side. … It was such an adrenaline boost, and I probably ran down it too quickly. All my friends were like, ‘We waited so long for you, and you were there for like half a second.’ But I was just really excited. So yeah, it was super cool.”

“I stopped doing [marathons] because they take a lot of time and a lot of training,” Dunkle said. “But many people encouraged me to do the Boston Marathon because it’s so famous and so old, the legacy attached to it, the tradition.”