Sandy Dubuc as she hits the start of Mile 25, which was also the scene of the Dana Farber cheering section.

Jimmy Shelton raced in his 26th Boston Marathon last month, Sandy Dubuc in her first. For one, the thrill was in the running—Shelton runs in more than 40 road races, at varying distances, every year—while for the other it was in the shouts and hugs she got from the crowd, the dollars she raised for a precious cause, and the memory of a little boy.

“I run in a lot of races,” says Shelton, a staffer in Central Receiving, who ran as a member of the Greater Lowell Road Runners (GLRR), the local running club that honored him not long ago with election to its members’ Hall of Fame. “I’ve been in ten already this year. But Boston is always really special.” 

It’s special to a lot of GLRR members. Fifty of them shared a bus into Boston this year, where they rented two hotel rooms and the services of several massage therapists. “We really take care of each other,” Shelton says. “If you run with the club, you’re never on your own—food, rest, a massage, whatever you need, there’s always someone there to support you.”

Support was a major theme of Sandy Dubuc’s race day as well. But the emphasis was a little different.

“I kept hearing, ‘Go, Matty’s mom!’ ‘Go, Matty’s dad!’—constantly, but especially from the kids,” she wrote on her website after the race. “I could have taken half an hour off my time by not stopping to hug so many friends and so many of Matty’s nurses along the way. But would I trade it for the time? No way.”

Dubuc, who works in the UMass Lowell treasurer’s office, ran the marathon—her first—in memory of her son Matty, who died of liver cancer in March 2007, at age 7, after a 2 ½-year battle. Her run, which she ran with her husband, raised more than $12,000 for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which had cared for Matty throughout his battle with the disease.

“The best advice I got before the run was just to enjoy it,” her web-journal entry continued. “It wasn’t about what time I finished in, or how much my legs were hurting, but for the reasons I was running. I smiled through almost the entire run.”

Both runners are planning to be back next year—Shelton for his 27th time, Dubuc for her second. For one, there will be more memories and perhaps more money to be raised; for the other, it will be—as always—just about the running.

“My mother wound up in a wheelchair in a nursing home,” Jimmy Shelton says. “She’s my inspiration. She’s all the inspiration I need. I’m not going to let it be that way for me.”