Fountain Hills residents Janet Stocks and Ricardo Maldonado had experienced the thrill of personal achievement at the Boston Marathon last week only to have their euphoria dashed by a horrific tragedy that devastated the iconic race.

Maldonado had a particularly good day. Personally he finished the race in two hours, 38 minutes, a personal record and good for fifth overall in his age category.

He and his fellow runners with the Banditos running club of Scottsdale had finished first in the masters (40-plus) age category for team competition.

With the first-place finish Maldonado and his team decided they wanted to attend the awards ceremony and retreated to a hotel to shower and change.

“I had just gotten out of the shower when we heard the news,” Maldonado said. “It was hard to assimilate what was going on.

“We didn’t hear a thing.”

Almost immediately Maldonado and his teammates began getting text messages inquiring about their welfare. However, they could not respond. Cellular service in the area had been shut down for fear it could unintentionally detonate additional explosive devices.

Maldonado said it finally occurred to them they had a land-line in the hotel room, so he called his wife to have her spread the word back home that everyone was all right.

Stocks had finished the race in around three hours, 40 minutes, less than 30 minutes before the blasts took place.

She had picked up her medal and met up with her husband. He had planned to watch her finish from the grandstand at the finish line, right across the street from the first blast, but he chose instead to move farther away from the crowd beyond the finish line.

“I heard the first blast and turned to see the smoke rising,” Stocks said. “We heard the second (blast) and didn’t know what was happening.”

Stocks said she and her husband were near a police officer and could overhear his radio calling for a bomb squad and describing the carnage on the street just a couple of blocks away.

A nurse by profession, Stocks said she contemplated going to the scene to see how she could help when suddenly they seemed to be surrounded by a rush of emergency vehicles heading to the scene. They headed back to their hotel.

“There was a huge buffet in the (hotel) lobby they had set up for the runners,” Stocks said. “But no one was in a celebratory mood; we were watching what had happened on TV screens.”

Stocks and her husband went to their hotel room and listened to the sirens of emergency vehicles come and go all night long.

Maldonado and his teammates abandoned the thought of attending the awards ceremony and decided to just get away from the scene.

They started walking out from the center of the city and were eventually picked up by a friend and taken to a home until they could return to where they were staying.

Maldonado said the wife of a teammate was forced to leave the race around mile 20 and had to be attended to at a medical tent in that area.

When the tent was vacated she was placed on a bus that drove around for more than three hours before she was able to get off and call for a ride. She was picked up and brought to the house where they were staying.

Stocks and Maldonado have both been residents of Fountain Hills for several years. She has run two other marathons, PF Chang’s in Phoenix and the Chicago Marathon, her hometown.

She is also a fixture at the Turkey Trot in Fountain Hills each Thanksgiving Day.

Maldonado is a Tucson native who has been a runner since high school, but did not run his first marathon, in his hometown, until 2010. He was encouraged by fellow runners to try a marathon after he completed the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim at the Grand Canyon.

It was the first Boston Marathon for both.

Stocks and Maldonado had never met until they arrived at the Boston airport Tuesday evening to return to Arizona.

They both came away from the experience very impressed with the people they had met.

“At the airport we were treated like VIPs,” Maldonado said. “They bent over backward to make sure we had what we needed.”

“I was so impressed by the people who live (in Boston),” Stocks said. “They were so nice and went out of their way to make sure we were comfortable.”

It was an experience neither will soon forget. Stocks said they went from one end of their emotions to the other very quickly.

“I went from the best experience in my running life to the worst thing I have ever witnessed,” Maldonado said. “It was just such a weird day.”