Suddenly, I wasn't thinking of my creaky knees, my achy back and my red, sore feet. I felt sick and sad for two people I never knew who also were just trying to cross the finish line.
Jeffrey Lee, just 21, collapsed moments after crossing the line. Lee finished the half marathon in 1 hour, 58 minutes, 6 seconds, at a 9-minute pace, according to the event's website.
Lee, a University of Pennsylvania senior from California, was in the undergrad program at Wharton while also working toward a master's in nursing, Penn spokeswoman Phyllis Holtzman said.
"It's devastating," Holtzman said. "We're all still trying to process this. His family is on their way here. The campus will be crushed by this."
The other man who died was 40 years old. He crumpled to the ground a quarter-mile from the finish line, according to police. His identity had not been released as of last night.
Both men apparently had suffered heart attacks. Both were pronounced dead at Hahnemann University Hospital.
I wondered if I'd seen those two men during the last six months, when my training runs took me along Kelly and Martin Luther King drives, hugging the Schuylkill in what runners call the "loop."
Before dawn yesterday, were those two men near me when 25,000 runners walked toward the starting line on Benjamin Franklin Parkway? Were their friends and relatives on the sidelines holding signs or giving runners high-fives?
The weather conditions were perfect. Few of us feared dehydration or heat exhaustion.
Marathon deaths are rare. Fewer than 1 out of every 100,000 marathoners die from sudden cardiac arrest during training or racing, according to a study by the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
