Marine crawls across finish line in tribute to fallen friends
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Micah Herndon, a Marine, was running the Boston Marathon on Monday as a tribute to three Marines he served with who were killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
“I went from being in a war zone one day to trying to live a normal life the next day,” he told the Kent (Ohio) Record-Courier. “We were going on three or more missions a day, constantly on guard and when I got back home, I was still in that mode. I never will be able to get over it, I don’t think, but I am coping. I am trying to get rid of the demons.”
That's where running comes in. And, sometimes, crawling.
He cramped up near the end of the finish line on Monday. So he crawled the rest of the way.
“I say their last names out loud while I’m listening to my music,” Herndon said of his running regimen. “I just repeat: ‘Ballard, Hamer, Juarez. Ballard, Hamer, Juarez.’”
Final time; 3:38.
“The pain that I was going through is nothing compared to the pain that they went through,” Herndon told WBZ.
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