In a hotel room in Boston in April 2013, Marco Seitelmann thought he was losing his mind. As usual, after he woke up, he went into the bathroom to shave and shower. But as he did this, he also saw himself doing it from somewhere else. ‘It was like I was standing behind Marco, watching what he was doing,’ he says. ‘I thought: “Okay, that’s not normal.”’
Marco, a personal trainer and a sales director for a hotel chain based in Berlin, had travelled to Boston with his friend Inga to run in the famous marathon. They would do the Boston 5k together on the Saturday, see some of the city, then she would watch him be a part of Monday’s marathon.
‘At first, I hated running. It was so hard,’ he says. He only took it up around 2008 because he wanted to experience the marathon in New York, his favourite city. ‘I would say to myself: “What are you doing? You’re crazy!” But after about six months, I found my flow. When I went running, my mind would become empty. It started to feel nice.’
In Boston, he really enjoyed the historic race, the oldest of the six World Marathon Majors. ‘I didn’t get my goal time, but it was a beautiful day. It was a public holiday and there were so many people out in the city, blue skies, springtime.’
He crossed the finish line in 3:47:36, collected his medal and headed towards the buses where he could retrieve his bag. Six or seven minutes later, he heard an explosion. ‘I turned around and saw dust everywhere. I knew it was not an accident.’ After 14 seconds, a second bomb went off, 190m further away from the finish line. ‘I tried to stay calm, to find my friend and get out of the area. I was crying the whole time. I didn’t know what had happened but I knew it was something bad.’ He couldn’t stop himself from thinking of the 9/11 attacks in New York and the images of stunned people hurrying away from the twin towers.
When he found Inga, she hugged him and said: ‘You’re alive! You’re alive!’ He still didn’t understand why he might not have been. Smartphones weren’t working in the area. Only when they got back to their hotel, one block south of the incident, did they learn the full extent of what had happened. Two pressure cooker bombs had exploded near the finish line while the race was going on, injuring 264 people, causing 16 of them to lose limbs, and killing three, including eight-year-old Martin Richard. Marco watched the news on TV for the next three hours, not thinking to shower after his long run.
‘For me the hardest thing was hearing that a young boy had died,’ he says. ‘Straight away I was thinking, “Why him and not you?” We went back outside to try to find a coffee and it felt like a war. There were military people, guys with weapons in the hotel lobby. We saw people outside with blood on their clothes.’
It was the next day that Marco felt the strange disassociation of watching himself shave. The final few days of his trip passed in a blur of emotion. He wore his souvenir Boston Marathon jacket. Strangers would approach him and hug him.
On the day he and Inga were flying home, police captured the bombers after extended periods of searching and shootouts. They were half-Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Tamerlan died in custody after being run over by Dzhokhar in a stolen car. In 2015, after a Boston court trial, Dzhokhar was sentenced to death. He remains in prison in Colorado.
Marco contacted a Berlin psychologist, Christina, that he knew through his work. He wanted to meet her in a coffee shop, not her office. ‘I thought I wasn’t the kind of person who sees a therapist.’ But all the signs pointed to his mental health being badly damaged. ‘I had stopped running, because when I tried to run I felt as if all my bones were broken. I would go half a mile and sit down on the street, crying. I couldn’t understand why other people were dead and I was not. After six months, I had my first panic attack.’
He turned on his television and saw part of a documentary about the 9/11 attacks, which set him off. He almost threw the screen out of the window onto the street. If he was on the street and saw a man with a backpack, he would cross the road. But he kept seeing the therapist.
‘Christina helped me to get back to running. She would come with me on her bicycle and talk to me all the way, only about positive things.’ Marco decided that he wanted to run Boston again in 2014, as his way of proving that the bombers hadn’t beaten him. ‘She didn’t forbid it, but she gave me a “red card”. It was absolutely the right decision.’ Instead he entered the Frankfurt Marathon, and ended up walking large parts of the course, crying.
More time passed, and by 2015, he was finally ready to return. ‘I gave Boston the chance to show me how beautiful it is,’ he says. Now he has completed the Marathon Majors and many other races including the London Landmarks Half in April. ‘I try to do maybe two marathons a year, and because I travel a lot for my job I will always try to do a race,’ he says. ‘I love that you can run anywhere, and the races feel like a party. Everybody comes out and when you get a smile from someone, you get power.’
A race may have been the source of his troubles, but running was an important part of the recovery process. ‘I learned not to give up with running,’ he says. ‘When you fall, try to get up. When you need help, just do it. The running community is amazing. I think it’s totally different from any other sport. We are all together, one huge family.’
Marco is running the London Landmarks Half Marathon on 7 April.
