Nine years after the Boston Marathon bombing, Devin Pao runs on her own terms

Devin Pao calls at the appointed time, her hair still damp, sipping an energy drink. It’s three weeks before the Boston Marathon, and she has just finished the longest run of her life — 24 miles on the dot, a hilly route she covered in 4 hours, 16 minutes at altitude in her home city of Colorado Springs. She pushed herself several miles farther than the workout laid out in the training program she’s been following.

“From everything I hear, the last five miles are really painful, so I wanted to get as close to the full distance as I could,” she says. “I feel like I’m ready for Heartbreak Hill. The competitive part of me wants to finish in four hours.”

Yet nine years after the tragedy that brought her sudden, unwanted attention, she understands there are limits to how prepared she can be. She will find herself in unknown territory somewhere on the course and count on training to get her through it.

On April 15, 2013, Devin ran the wrong way across the marathon finish line on Boylston Street pushing an empty wheelchair. She was conditioned to move toward trouble. She knew what she had heard — two explosions, people screaming in panic and pain — but not what she would see or what she would be called on to do as an undergraduate student volunteer.

She ran back in the opposite direction moments later pushing the same chair, bearing a gravely injured man named Jeff Bauman. An EMT, Paul Mitchell, and a Good Samaritan named Carlos Arredondo helped her ferry Bauman to the medical tent on Copley Square. Bauman lost his lower legs in the bombing, but Devin’s quick response helped save his life.

Devin would pay an emotional price for absorbing the aftermath of a violent attack that killed three people and left more than 260 wounded. Photographs of Bauman’s rescue, instantly transmitted…