DETROIT – Just 90 seconds before the first explosion, Nancy Daum, of Ann Arbor, crossed the finish line in Boston.
Daum felt and heard the blast. She, like many others, ran for cover.
"I heard like um, it was kind of like a 4th of July fireworks, like a cannon at the finale. It was very odd, why is this going off? It didn't make sense," she said.
Moments after the blast, Daum was rushed into a nearby hotel. For a few hours, her friends who were back at their own hotel were concerned. They knew she had been close to the area where the bombings happened.
Thankfully, Daum was not hurt.
One of her friends, Dearborn native Alexis Ness, also ran the Boston Marathon on Monday. She heard the explosions from her hotel room in Copley Plaza. She saw the chaos down below on the street.
"We heard two very loud explosions, one right after the other basically, but two separate explosions, separated by less than a minute I would say. Extremely loud ... louder than lightning. What you would imagine a bomb would sound like," said Ness.