We are lucky.
We are craft beer drinkers who enjoy rallying around our favorite beverage. It brings us together through innumerable social opportunities. It makes us fast friends with strangers. It gives us an opportunity to celebrate and debate and argue about the silliest of things.
And we are lucky.
We attend brewfests and tour breweries and host tastings. We have quests and pilgrimages and develop words like “beervana.” We analyze and take notes and write and wax poetic. We are beverage nerds.
And we are lucky.
For the vast majority of our days, we get to do these things without our lives being interrupted by bombings and shootings and other personal and public tragedies. For that, I am deeply thankful.
I will never be fast enough to qualify to run the Boston Marathon. That alone makes me appreciate the event even more. Since becoming a runner four years ago, I’ve completed two marathons. I’ve experienced the euphoria of exceeding my goals and the exhausted, but disappointed relief of persevering when it wasn’t my day. I admire my friends who ran the Boston Marathon yesterday and rejoice in their success at reaching the grandest stage. I am deeply thankful they are safe.
On Saturday I took part in Virgina Tech’s 3.2 Mile Run in Remembrance, albeit from 2,200 miles away on a windy, cold morning in Missoula, MT. An annual event created in the wake of the shooting at Virginia Tech, eight thousand supporters turned out to run, honor and remember the 32 who lost their lives on April 16, 2007.
As a Virginia Tech grad I learned six years ago today that one need not be anywhere near the campus to be deeply and profoundly affected by what took place. As humans, events like these touch us all. Yet, having grown up nearby and spending years living and learning there, it felt like it had been done to me personally. It still does.
Runners of all abilities are feeling the same way today. Non-runners, too.
As runners we voluntarily inflict pain upon ourselves in a quest we can only individually appreciate. Yesterday, we were handed a pain we can’t even collectively understand.
“No one deserves a tragedy,” Virginia Tech Professor Nikki Giovanni told us at the Convocation on the day after the shooting – words that immediately ring clear in the wake of yesterday’s bombings. Yet, in the hours, days, months and now years after April 16, 2007, it is the spirit, healing, perseverance and sense of community that emerges as Virginia Tech’s most enduring legacy.
So, too, will the Boston Marathon and its organizers, runners, and fans rise above yesterday’s tragedy. Already a symbol of great personal strength and triumph, it is now certain to become an example of community endurance and perseverance.
Today I will run as long and far as I need to provide some measure of personal support for the victims of yesterday’s tragedy. Tonight, I will pause with a favorite beer and remember how lucky I am to be able to devote free time to a silly endeavor like Growler Fills.
