By Paisley Zhilan Huang, Wanheng Jiang and Haiyi Bi
Boston University News Service
More than 30,000 runners around the globe run for the 2025 Boston Marathon, and medical volunteers ensured their safety from the beginning till they crossed the finish line.
The Boston Athletic Association provided more than 30 medical stations located in the start area, along the course, and the finish area, offering basic medical assistance to runners, according to BAA’s website.
Around 10:00 a.m. in the morning, medical volunteers, wearing white jackets with red hoods, gathered outside the medical tents in Copley where the race ended. Some lined up wheelchairs, getting ready to transport runners quickly to medical tents from the finishing line, according to Miranda Tsang, a first-time volunteer at the Boston Marathon.
Typical health issues that occur to runners include dehydration, low blood pressure and heat stroke, Tsang said.
Treating marathon runners was different from the usual medical procedures in the hospital, as most runners were healthy and able to recover fast from the race, Sydney Karnovsky, a volunteer and sports medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said. Volunteers’ responsibility was to take care of a huge volume of runners, “be with them in this pretty intense, vulnerable moment and get them better.”
Karnovsky was a runner in the Boston Marathon four years ago. “It’s one of my favorite days in Boston,” she said. “It’s really cool to see the whole city come alive with runners.” Now, being a volunteer, she said she enjoys helping people in the tent where they can recover and go out to celebrate their achievements.
With thousands of runners and visitors flooding in Boston, volunteers avoided local medical resources from getting overwhelmed, Robert Piotrowski, an emergency medicine physician at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, said. The medical teams in the finish area consisted of physical therapists, internal medicine physicians, cardiologists and even two mental health providers to help people with acute stress. Most people who came into the medical tent feeling sick would get better and leave, “go with their families and enjoy the rest of the day,” with only a few of them being taken to hospitals, he said.
It’s Piotrowski’s ninth year working at the medical tent. “I’ve met people from Ecuador, from Belgium, from here,” he said. “All these people have inspirational stories, whether it’s their first marathon or their 50th marathon.”
Volunteers also took care of runners’ medical needs along the course. Maddux Cook, a Boston University student, was a volunteer at Newton-Wellesley Hospital’s medical tent 10 miles before the finish line.
Cook started volunteering at 7:30 a.m., two hours before the first wave of wheelchair runners reached the tents, followed by professional men and the public race. Most runners came in because of cramps, he said, and they got stretching or medication to go through the pain.
Cook’s main responsibility was to keep track of runners who came in and out of the tent, marking whether they were returning to the race, taking the bus to the finish line or leaving with a family member.
“It was really cool just to see people, especially after they had come into the tent, be able to go back out and keep trying to make it through the race,” he said.
Medical volunteers support runners by helping them come through pain and discomfort, but everyone can contribute along the race even by simply cheering from the crowds, Piotrowski said.
“If you run a race and you’re coming around the corner, there are one thousand people screaming,” he said. “It gives you that boost to get over that next mile.”
