BOSTON – Jody Zylstra of Annandale, Minn., had been training for the Boston Marathon for the past eight years. After nearly a decade of disappointment, the 34-year-old finally qualified for the 2013 race and made the near-1,500 mile trip to the Bay State, only to come up two-tenths of a mile short of the finish last Monday.

As she hit the homestretch on Boylston Street and passed the 26-mile marker, Zylstra heard an explosion go off a good distance up the road, but she initially made nothing of it, thinking it was a celebratory cannon blast.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh, it’s Patriots’ Day and it must be some sort of celebration,’ and then it donned on me that this wouldn’t have been the time (for that),” Zylstra said.

Moments later, a second explosion occurred, convincing Zylstra that this was no celebration.

“When the second explosion went off,  (the other runners and I) saw the smoke and we assumed that it was a bomb,” she said. “We stopped and knocked into each other, and we just didn’t think that was planned.”

Worry and concern immediately struck Zylstra, but she was not so much fearing for her own life, as for those of her family members, who were waiting for her near the finish line.

Chaos at the finish line

Making the trip with Jody was her 34-year-old husband Joe Zylstra, his sister, her husband and a family friend, all of whom planned to witness Jody reach her longtime goal. The family planted itself outside of Lord & Taylor on Boylston Street, about one-tenth of a mile from the overcrowded finish line, and anxiously awaited her arrival.

As they waited, Joe heard a boom that came from the finish line’s direction, and had the same initial thoughts as his wife.

“My reaction when the first one went off was that I thought it was a cannon,” he said. “But then I saw all the smoke and then I processed it that it was a bomb.”

Then the unthinkable happened – a second bomb went off directly across the street.

“Just as soon as I processed that (it was a bomb,) I turned straight ahead, and all of a sudden the second one went off right in front of me,” Joe said.

At that point, Joe and his brother-in-law sprang into action, pulling his sister and friend down to the ground.

“We didn’t know if there’d be more, so we just kept saying ‘stay down, stay down,’ and we did that for about 30 seconds,” Joe said.

No more bombs went off, so he and his family got up and made a dash for a side road, receiving a first-hand glimpse of the gore and terror that resulted from the explosion across the street.

“We went around the corner and me and my brother-in-law saw a guy with shrapnel in his leg,” Joe said. “He was able to make it across the street to us, so (my brother-in-law) was kind of tending to him while I was trying to help my sister and friend, and we just started trying to figure out where my wife was and how we were going to find her.”

A frantic search

Little did they know it, but Jody was about than one-tenth of a mile down the road from them. And while Joe and the family knew that she was likely safe since she had not crossed their sight yet, Jody had no clue if they were impacted by the blow.

“It was just terror and chaos and fear,” Jody said. “I didn’t know where they were, but I just knew that they were down there. Immediately my mind went to ‘where are they’ and ‘is there another bomb?’ There had been one and then two and (the other runners and I) are standing there, waiting for another.”

Jody paused, listened, and when she felt comfortable that there would be no more explosions, she began to frantically search for them.

“I was running and kind of scanning the crowd looking for them,” she said. “I thought they might not be right at the finish line since it would probably be really busy, so I thought they must have been somewhere within the last half-mile stretch.”

But she couldn’t find them.

“The police ended up pushing (the other runners and I) back, and I eventually found out that they pushed (my family) down the side streets, so we ended up increasing the distance and we just didn’t know it,” Jody said.

She then sought help from locals, using their phones to try to reach Joe; but none of the calls went through. Eventually, she reached family members back in Minnesota, and to her relief, they said they had spoken to Joe. He and the family were safe, searching for her as well.

They all eventually met up, emotions at their peaks, still in shock.

“We found out afterwards that we were within hundreds of yards of each other they just hadn’t seen me yet,” Jody said as tears welled in her eyes.

“It took some time,” added Joe, as he turned his head toward his wife with a smile. “But eventually we found her.”

Taylor C. Snow can be reached at [email protected].