A pair of sisters are set to run the Boston Marathon together on Monday, almost 20 years to the day after they survived the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting, ESPN reported.
Laura Hall, 34, and Sarah Bush, 36, will both run the historic race while their hometown of Littleton, Colo., prepares to honor the anniversary of the massacre, which left 13 people dead on April 20, 1999.
Hall, a 14-year-old freshman on the day of the shooting, was in the cafeteria when a janitor started yelling for students to run. She ended up being one of 40 kids barricaded in the choir office before SWAT officers escorted them out of the building four hours later.
Bush, who was 16 years old at the time, was taking a math test when baseball coach Robin Ortiz ran into the room and told them to “get the hell out — somebody is shooting,” according to the ESPN report. She ran from the school and stopped when she hit a field across from the building as law enforcement officials moved in.
Hall, now a mother of four, said she suffered from PTSD-induced panic attacks following the shooting, often sleeping in the same bed as her sister.
Bush said she struggled with sending her five children to school, especially after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
The sisters, who now live a mile away from each other in Utah, both ran cross country in high school and explained to the outlet how it helped them find solace after the tragedy.
“If nothing else goes right in my day, and if I have gone for a run, and I have tackled that, that means that I can tackle that day,” Bush told ESPN. “Running has the same effect for me as a lot of the medication people are on for depression. I have realized the relief you get from running is the same as the relief you get from a medication.”
The sisters said training together for the Boston Marathon, which Bush ran in 2018, has felt like an emotional release
“I love doing a marathon because it’s hard and it proves to me that I can conquer hard things and we as people can conquer hard things,” Hall said. “There is no person that can tell me that running a marathon is easy.”
The sisters told ESPN that finishing the prestigious marathon together just days before the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting would be their way of showing the world that survivors can move forward after tragedy.