Nutrition - Weight Loss, Robert Wheeler was the bare-chested college kid pictured in so many photos, with the shirt he had worn while running the 2013 Boston Marathon now seen serving as a makeshift tourniquet holding together the shorn leg of a man gruesomely injured by the finish-line explosive.
Later, Wheeler was on TV news shows, talking about having finished 90 or so seconds before the first bomb exploded, and running back through the finish line, looking to see what he could do, and who he could help, such as the man whom he had woven a tourniquet for. Wheeler was honored at center court of Boston Garden, a sellout crowd of Celtics fans cheering him, acknowledging with a standing ovation what he had done. He was hailed at his college graduation ceremony, where he received what everyone thought was a diploma. The university president made special note of his presence.
Nutrition - Weight Loss, Robert Wheeler was an inspirational story perfect for a time when a city and its people needed a lift.
But as those minutes moved further and further away from 2:49 p.m. on April 15, 2013, the moment when the two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line, the one needing a hand was Robert Wheeler.
* * *
Last August, four months after the Boston Marathon and everything that came with it—success, heroics, celebrity, despair—Wheeler was living out of his Dodge Caliber or in a tent he’d pitch when the weather allowed.
He would be homeless until the early part of October, when the first chill of autumn made sleeping in a car not such a good idea. Then, he says, “I swallowed my pride” and reached out for help.
And once he did, the world turned for him. A new job came about. A better relationship with his father developed. And most of all, he says, his appreciation for running grew. “Going through this experience rekindled my true love for running,” says Wheeler, who will once again run Boston on Monday. “It was my escape.”
As much as his situation has improved, though, Wheeler has not forgotten the series of events that came in the wake of his marathon heroics—and how running helped him through them.
On Patriots’ Day, around 2:45 p.m., Wheeler, 23 at the time, had completed the Boston Marathon in 4:01:51. His name does not appear on the Boston Athletic Association’s official records, as he was wearing the bib number of a friend. He had yet to get his finisher’s medal when he heard the first explosion. Like many, he thought it could have been a generator malfunctioning. Then he heard the second explosion. Instincts took over, and Wheeler raced back in the direction of the finish-line area. He first helped to disassemble metal barricades that were keeping some spectators from escaping the area. Then he continued up Boylston Street, at first running past Ron Brassard, a 51-year-old man who had been watching the race with his wife, Karen, and daughter Krystara. Ron was now on the ground, he left leg sliced with shrapnel.
“Then I hear [Krystara] screaming. She had been calling over for me. I immediately realized there was significant bleeding from his leg,” Wheeler recently recalled, retelling a story he’s told dozens of times. “Before I am able to kneel down I pull off my shirt and wrap it around the wound. I realize there is arterial bleeding. I was yelling for a belt and there was no response. So another guy came over with his shirt and we made a makeshift tourniquet. [Then] I put Ron’s leg on my shoulder so that way the pressure would lean against it. I tried to keep Ron calm and his daughter calm. And told them everything would be all right.”
Eventually, Wheeler and others got Brassard into a wheelchair and rushed him to the medical tent. Wheeler went back to the finish area and helped a man who was slipping out of wheelchair. He planned to go and assist others, but before he could, police ordered him to leave. He walked past the medical tents and to the area where volunteers and other runners who had completed the race were gathered. Many did not know the extent of the devastation. A volunteer came over to him and put a medal on him. “She was staring at me in horror,” Wheeler says. “They didn’t know what was down there. I realized I was only wearing my shorts and I’m covered in blood. Everyone is staring at me.”
* * *
Days later Wheeler was back to work at the two part-time jobs he held. He was also finishing classes at Framingham (Mass.) State University, from which he expected to graduate in May.
He was also trying to deal with the requests from the media—local newspapers, the network news show, even a Russian news agency—all looking for a feel-good story amid the tragedy. He obliged as many as he could. They gave him a chance to visit with Brassard, who was in the hospital recovering. In the frantic moments when the two had been together on Boylston Street, Wheeler and Brassard had little time to converse. But now, after a few visits and after sharing stories, Wheeler and Brassard were developing a relationship. “They are part of my life,” Wheeler says of the Brassard family, “not unlike any extended family.”
Amid all the activity, though, Wheeler says he wasn’t sleeping well, and his head was ringing from temporary ear damage he had suffered on race day. He was trying to process all he had seen once the bombs went off, who he was able to help, and who he hadn’t. He met with a counselor, but he says the best relief came when he would go for a run.
As he had learned back when he was 12 or 13, when he first started running the trails in state parks outside of Boston, troubles seemed to fade, or fade temporarily, when he was on a run. The Wednesday after the marathon he went for one. Four weeks after Boston he ran the Providence Marathon, in Rhode Island (time: 4:14:54). Two weeks after that he ran the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, cutting nearly 45 minutes off his Boston time. “My running went into full assault,” says Wheeler, who had never run competitively in high school and only during his senior year at Framingham. “When you wanted to cry and relieve that stress, you could go out for a run. That was my happiness.”
Elsewhere, happiness was eluding him. Even though Wheeler says his college adviser had told him he “was good for graduation,” Wheeler learned days before the ceremony that he did not have the proper credits to receive his diploma. Two classes he had carried over from a college he previously attended were now not being accepted by Framingham State, Wheeler says. The college told him he could walk at the graduation ceremony, the one where the president praised his marathon heroics. He would need to complete two courses, though, before his diploma became real.
He signed up for summer classes, but the added credits would cost a couple of thousand dollars. Money was getting tight. He had lost one of his jobs as an area coordinator with an after-school program when his position was filled while he was on a three-week medical leave. Then, midway through the summer, he asked for time off from a bartending job he had held during college. The bar’s live music did not mix well with his ear damage. But when he returned, Wheeler says, he was offered a lower-paying job as a busboy, a position he decided not to accept. Around the same time, he had to move out of his college residence in Ashland, Mass., and “I didn’t have the down payment to put down on my next place.”
And once he did his life changed, though one constant remained.
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Wheeler admits that in the aftermath of the marathon he felt “unfocused” at times and experienced “significant levels of stress.” Steve Flynn could see this. A deacon at a church Wheeler attended, Flynn, 57, had met Wheeler about 10 years ago, and over time the two became friends. They often hiked and went on long bike rides together. “He was getting pulled in a lot of different directions. All the news agencies wanted to meet with him,” Flynn says of Wheeler. “I tried to mentor him and say he could push back and say no to some of these people.”
Flynn sought assistance for his friend through the different agencies available to the bombing victims, but he could not find the proper channels. “Rob has been hit with more obstacles than most of us would ever be hit with,” Flynn says, “but he has been able to overcome them. The key is physical fitness. That has kept him on the track.”
Mostly what Wheeler did was run. “I had a lot of emotions I had to cope with, from anger to sorrow to regret,” says Wheeler, who still wonders whether he could have helped more injured people after the attacks. “I faced different emotions on different days. Some days I would be facing all those emotions [when running], other days I would be [running] just for me...All those emotions, in a sense, throwing them into my run, for my sanity and for me. To keep me going. It was vital to keep running. My running saved me.”
Through the summer and fall he ran six half marathons, one 50K race, and three more marathons. Wheeler says he often was able to get complimentary entry into events when he told race directors about his Boston Marathon experience. “I kept doing the races because that is what I had,” says Wheeler. “All these races were able to show me the generosity and let me run in them.” He used his running to raise money for One Fund Boston, the fund established to aid victims of the bombings and their families. (He estimates he has raised about $10,000.)
For all the miles he ran, though, perhaps Wheeler’s toughest journey came in early October.
In the weeks he was living out of his car, he had decided not to ask others for financial assistance. One friend suggested he go on welfare. “I am not against [welfare],” he says, “but a lot of people take advantage. I want to earn my own.” He also did not tell the Brassards of his situation even though he was in touch with them. “The family was going through enough,” Wheeler says. What he finally did was reach out to his father, Richard Romeo. The two, he says, have had a fitful relationship through the years. But his father let Wheeler move back in with him. “He made things happen for me,” Wheeler says of his father. (Romeo did not return calls from Runner’s World Newswire.) “I assume if I had spoken up sooner I would have made things happen sooner, but a lot of it was dumb pride.”
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In late October, Wheeler entered the Bay State Marathon in Lowell, Mass. He ran 3:40:10 that day, but he remembers the race not for his finish but for what happened at Mile 20. “I feel foolish for saying this, but I started crying,” he recalls. “For the first time it felt OK to do that.”
The weeks that followed brought more signs that, if anything, Wheeler was on a new path. He started a new job, working the overnight shift at a center for children with intellectual disabilities. (He uses his half-hour break to go for a run.) In March, with his course work completed, he received his degree from Framingham State. He also set his sights on becoming a firefighter, scheduling his civil service test for later this month. “Being at the marathon [last year],” he says, “taught me I want to help people this way.”
And throughout the winter he continued running, preparing for his next marathon, Monday’s Boston Marathon.
Wheeler gained entry to the race via a Boston Athletic Association essay-writing contest. The contest rules asked potential runners to describe how they had been “personally and profoundly affected” by the bombing attacks. In his essay, Wheeler says he wrote of “my basic story line. I had just crossed the finish line when the explosion had happened. I ran back and helped.”
And once he did his life changed, though one constant remained.
“Running was the one thing I had when all else was taken. My running was still there. It was something I loved,” Wheeler says. “Looking back at the things I went through, I was inspired to keep running and not quit. To make something positive of it all.”
