Running for a reason

On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs detonated 12 seconds and 210 yards apart near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring several hundred others, including 16 who lost limbs.

Jake McGeehan has kept this awful memory to use as motivation to qualify for the 121st annual marathon that begins at 10 a.m. on Monday morning in the heart of Boston. He will run to help raise money for the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The program has raised 12 million dollars worldwide, and has helped civilians and military heroes who have suffered traumatic injuries.

Reny, a high school senior at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, was critically injured, but doctors were able to save her life and both her legs. McGeehan will be one of 40 members on the Stepping Strong team.

McGeehan, a 2014 Jim Thorpe graduate and now a senior at Penn State, ran a 2-hour and 51-minute marathon last May in Pittsburgh to beat the 3-hour and 5-minute qualifying time and earn his chance to participate in the world’s largest marathon — one that attracts over 30,000 runners each year.

“In my first marathon when I was a club runner for Penn State and a sophomore, I missed the cut by 28 seconds,” said McGeehan. “The second time I kept a good pace through the 18-mile mark, and although I ran as fast as I could near the end, I was actually running slower than I did at the start. But I still beat the time limit.”

McGeehan, who calls running his “happy time” that relieves him from stress, has been training for this 26.2 mile race by completing a seven to 10 mile run every day for the past five months.

“I run the hills at State College to prepare for Heartbreak Hill in Boston,” he said. “That’s the mile-and-a-half uphill challenge after you get to the 20-mile mark.”

In Pittsburgh, McGeehan finished 45th out of 3400 runners, and was sixth in his age group.

“In Boston, the elite group of world class runners is the first wave and then I get to start with the next wave.”

The magnitude of the marathon has already begun to get McGeehan both excited and nervous, but he expects his adrenaline will kick in once he begins the race and finds some free space.

“With that many runners, you can’t help but bang shoulders until the pack breaks up,” he said. “You have to be careful not to knock ankles with someone and take a nasty fall.”

He will leave for Boston on Saturday with his mother Robin and his father Jack, and the family will visit Jake’s older brother, Tyler who lives in the city.

McGeehan will graduate next month from PSU with a degree in mechanical engineering. He intends to move to Virginia and use his mechanical aptitude to work on ships for the US Navy.

But for now, Jake McGeehan has set his mind on the Boston Marathon for his cause and for the competition he has within himself to run the best he can.

“I would love to run under three hours,” he said. “But I really just want to have fun with it and have a good time.”

Donations to McGeehan’s fundraising cause can be made to his CrowdRise page, an affiliation of Gofundme.