As seniors Sophie Lev and Ella MacVeagh trained together for their first marathon, they had one overarching objective in mind.

“Our goal is just to finish,” MacVeagh had said.

But the April 15 bombings that left three dead and hundreds injured at the finish line of the Boston Marathon crushed that aspiration in a day of pain and disappointment.

The two seniors started training on their own, doing four-mile runs on weekdays and a long run on weekends, increasing the weekend run’s distance by two miles each week. According to MacVeagh, when the seniors started running with Team Brookline, a group of marathon runners from the town, they realized that most people increase their mileage more slowly.

“Appearently we did it all wrong,” MacVeagh had said. “I think because we’re so young, and because we’ve both been in good shape for quite a while that it didn’t hurt our bodies to train improperly.”

The premise of Team Brookline is that everyone raises money for a Brookline cause. The two seniors, who were the youngest members of the group, were collecting donations for the Brookline Teen Center.

“People have always been surprised, expecially because we are still in high school. We’ll be running with some people on our long runs and we’ll be talking about ‘Oh, what do you do for work?’ And we’ll be like, ‘Oh, we’re students.’ And so it’s pretty surprising to people, which also makes fundraising easier,” MacVeagh said.

According to Sophie Lev, the two of them woke up at 5:45 a.m. on the morning of the marathon to board buses to Hopkinton. After three hours of anxious waiting, they crossed the starting line and began the race. Lev said that most of the race was smooth sailing.

“We saw people we knew in most towns,” she said. “Every town was something new to look forward to.”

Sophie was wearing a specialized GPS unit her parents had rented so that they could track her location in real time. Carol Lev, Sophie’s mother, decided to rent the device from My Athlete Live after a coworker reccomended it to her as a way of maximizing the number of opportunities to watch Sophie.

“It turned out to be a real blessing that we had done it,” Mrs. Lev said.

Sophie’s parents, sister and grandparents cheered her and MacVeagh on in Wellesley.

After they passed by, the family drove to Boston to meet them at the finish line. According to Mrs. Lev, they parked at a friend’s house on Beacon St. and started heading to the grandstand, for which they had passes to enter.

They started walking up Boylston Street, heading to the Coley Square finish line so that they could cross behind it and enter the grandstand on the other side of the street. On the block of Boylston Street between Exeter and Dartmouth Streets, Mrs. Lev’s parents, who are in their eighties, asked the group to slow down.

“First, I heard what sounded like an extremely loud cannon,” Mrs. Lev said.

Mrs. Lev said she saw dust, smoke, and glass shoot up two storefronts away from them as the first bomb detonated.

“We were walking in the direction of the first explosion,” she said. “Ten more seconds and we would have been right there.”

Mrs. Lev said that no one knew when the attack would end.

“And as we were trying to figure out what to do–we were turning, trying to assess the situation–the second bomb went off the next block over,” she said. “So at that point, we thought it was wartime and there were going to be ten more bombs going off.”

According to Mrs. Lev, the group walked back and turned onto Exeter Street to get off of Boylston Street.

“At that point, we knew we were safe, and we knew Sophie wasn’t part of this, because we knew she was still a ways out at that point,” she said.

Sophie, however, did not have the luxury of knowing her family was safe. She described a chaotic scene at Massachusetts Avenue, where she and MacVeagh were stopped.

“I think what came first was scared, because I literally thought my family was all dead,” she said, “because someone had told me that the bombs were in the grandstand, and my parents had gotten special tickets to be able to sit there, so I was hysterical.”

Sophie said she  tried calling her parents with her cell phone, but the service was down. After several tries, she finally found someone whose phone was working and reached her father, who had set out to find Ella and Sophie once the family was back at their friend’s house on Beacon Street. With the help of the GPS tracker, Mr. Lev was able to find them and bring them back to where the Lev family was waiting.

Mrs. Lev said that the reunion was a cathartic close to such an unsettling period.

“That was the best part of the day, just to make sure that were all together and all safe,” she said.

Sophie said that her emotions started to shift in the days following the bombings.

“After a few days, or maybe the day after, what came next was the anger. Obviously our first worry was what happened and the fact that people died and the fact that so many people were injured. But also what came with it was stripping away pride from so many people that had worked so hard,” Sophie said. “People are congratulating me, saying ‘I’m so proud of you,’ and obviously I ran 25.7 miles or something to be proud of, but you can’t really feel that. That’s what we were dreaming of, like I can’t wait to cross the finish line.”

Mrs. Lev said that she was calm on the day of the bombings, before she learned of the full extent of the carnage and how lucky they were.

“It became a little more overwhelming the next day,” she said. “I’m just glad we all came through it. So many people didn’t.”

“My mom is rarely someone that gets emotional, but she cried the next day,” Sophie said.

Sophie said that she wants to do the Boston Marathon again after college.

“I hope to run it one day again with Ella,” she said. “We need to.”

Aaron Sege can be contacted at [email protected].