Abbeville resident ready to run in Boston Marathon on Monday

Anne Sagrera wants to run in the Boston Marathon on Monday. Running 26.2 miles is hard enough, but to run it in a place where two bombs went off a year ago and killed three people and injured 250 others makes it extremely hard.
Sagrera, who lives south of Abbeville, left for Boston this morning to run in her second Boston Marathon and her third ever marathon.
There are expected to be 36,000 runners and 3,000 policemen for security in Boston.
She qualified for her second Boston Marathon after posting an impressive time of three hours and 30 minutes at last year’s marathon.
As the race approached this year, Sagrera did not hesitate going back to Boston.
“I need to go back and finish what we started,” Sagrera said. “To help everyone who was affected and to honor those.”
Sagrera and her husband Craig are the parents of two children, who are 7 and 11 years old. As the weeks leading up to the race approached, her children said they were scared about her going back to Boston to run. By the children being worried, it helped Sagrera make up her mind.
“What made my decision was when one of my children said they were scared for me to go back,” she said. “I knew I was not going to let evil and terror win. I want to show my children not to be afraid.”
This week she continued talking to her children and reassuring them everything was going to be OK.
Before the two bombs went off, she had finished the race and was waiting in the family meeting area for her husband. She was sitting and heard the first bomb explode. Little did she know it, but by not finding her husband after the race, saved them from being injured in the explosion. Had they found each other, they would have stayed by the finish line and watched the race, and been near the explosions.
However, her husband was supposed to find her at the 21 mile mark and then make his way to the finish line in a subway. Sagrera reached the 21-mile mark but never saw her husband. He waited but she had already run past the mark.
Eventually, he began making his way to the finish line. Unfortunately, when the bombs went off, the subway stopped with him and hundreds of other people in it.
His wife, over time, was able to get a text to him to say she was OK after the bombing.
A year later, she has assured her family and friends that Boston will probably be the safest place in America on that particular day because of the heavy security. She said everyone will be looking for back packs sitting on sidewalks and anything that looks suspicious.
“The race has been in my heart. I am ready to go back,” she added. “I want to take back Boston.”