Palisades Runner Has Heavy Heart for Boston Marathon Victim

Pacific Palisades resident Ken Heisz was at a Starbucks inside the Marriot Hotel in Copley Place April 15 after completing the Boston Marathon. Heisz finished the race in three hours and 41 minutes running in the second wave behind the elites.

It was his sixth Boston Marathon, and it's one he will never forget. Heisz, 55 and a commercial business litigation attorney at a firm in Santa Monica, was one of 11 runners from Pacific Palisades who ran that day.

"I got up there and was standing in line when I heard the first explosion," Heisz told Patch. "I felt a little shake. I go to a lot of sporting events. My first thought was a cannon going off, but it did not sound like that to me. It sounded like a bomb going off."

A few seconds went by, Heisz looked around and heard the second bomb go off. Reflecting quickly on Sept. 11, 2001, Heisz wanted to make sure a plane had not flown into any buildings in downtown. People started flooding the Copley lobby. That's when one person told Heisz a bomb had gone off at the marathon finish line and the race was canceled.

Heisz raced up to his room to contact his wife and other people he knew in the marathon.

"I knew I couldn't be of help to anyone," Heisz said about his condition that day. "I was frankly having a hard time walking at that point. My legs were beat up."

After turning on his television and hearing news reports of cell phone service being shut down in Boston, he began texting and emailing. Hundreds of emails began flooding his inbox.

"I spent a long time communicating by text and email with family and friends and I had my wife call their parents, because they had just arrived home before seeing it on the news," Heisz said about his running companions, who also turned out to be safe from the explosion.

Watching the news along with everyone else in the country Monday, Heisz learned two hotels near him on Boylston Street were evacuated, while another was on lockdown. He waited to hear if Copley would follow suit. Instead, they closed the hotel, canceled room service and closed the restaurant, but served a complimentary buffet.

"By the time I got there [at 8:30 p.m.], the line was like 150 people," Heisz said about the buffet, so he ventured outside to find food. Outside Heisz ran into police officers, paramedics and members of the National Guard barricading the immediate area near the site of the bomb explosions.

"Just in front of our hotel looked like a militarized zone," he said.

There were "probably 30 to 40" of three different vehicles near the barricading, consisting of medical units, to police cars to police motorcycles. Pedestrians were not allowed to go back to Boylston Street so Heisz ventured behind the hotel to Columbus Avenue and ran into other runners with the same idea.

Luckily the group found a bar near Boylston, and somber mood inside was exhibited by everyone.

"Everybody, whether in the hotel, lobby, elevator, bar...there was no celebration," Heisz said. "Everybody was feeling it and trying to make some kind of sense out of it and assimilate 'why?' and 'how could this happen?' As a parent, it was very hard to come out."

Remembering Martin Richard

Heisz thought about the 8-year-old Dorchester boy, Martin Richard, who died in the explosion and then thought about his own 12-year-old son, Hunter, who, along with his wife Leslie, accompanied him to past running events. They've stood at the same finish line in Boston Marathon's past where Monday's explosion occurred.

"I did a flashback and put myself in his family's position," Heisz said about Martin. "I didn't sleep well that night as I'm sure other runners did not. I kept thinking about Martin and their entire family, because I knew his sister lost a leg and his mother suffered some head injuries."

Heisz has been a marathon runner since the 1980s and ran in his first L.A. Marathon in 1986. He said he's always enjoyed running, track and field and cross country in high school. He picked up again after college and became driven to run in marathons.

"Running a marathon was something I've always wanted to do," he said. "Bill Rogers ignited the marathon craze when he went and won the Boston Marathon three to four times. So I always thought I've love to run in Boston. I've been fortunate to qualify over the years."

Heisz has been qualifying since 1996 and 1997 but there are years he simply could not attend. He last ran in the Boston Marathon in 2011, and he's run in marathons in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Anchorage, Big Sur and the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington D.C.

Back in Santa Monica, Heisz said he goes running with a group that meets at Peet's Coffee shop at 14th Street and Montana Avenue four days a week. His two companions from that running group emailed him in Boston, who said they were all right. Heisz said one of his friends, also from Pali, said they had a friend who went to see their daughter run in the race, and was one of the nearly dozen who had to have their leg amputated following the blasts.

"The running community is close-knit, in a strange way," Heisz said. "When you run the Boston Marathon, you feel a special allegience kind of thing. Whether you’re a marathoner or not, it’s the one race I think everybody would love to have on their bucket list that they were able to do."

The course has so many stories to tell, he noted, highlighting "Heartbreak Hill" at Mile 20 in Newton, which is something everyone knows about and trains for. The Boston Marathon coinciding with Patriots Day, a Massachusetts holiday commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord, makes the city special.

Heisz, like many who ran or could not finish Monday's Boston Marathon, said he will be back to run it again.

"This is a very horrific and cowardly act done by whoever," he said. "It just feels like a personal attack on all of us."

On Tuesday, April 16, Heisz said no one was phased when American Airlines' system went down and started canceling flihts. He waited a couple of hours, and was able to get his flight back to L.A.

"On a normal day you'd be frustrated or annoyed, but people were pretty calm about it, because it was in the backdrop of what just happened the day before," he said. "I think people were pretty stoic about it."

Heisz got back home in Pacific Palisades near 11 p.m. Tuesday night and hugged his loved ones.

"You wanted to reconnect with loved ones and be thankful for each day you have with them," he said. "Like poor Martin and those two people looking cheer on [runners], they are gone for nothing they did. That's so heavy on everyone's hearts."

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