Charlotte Davis: Running on Empty For A Place To Be

by Leonard Shapiro

It was an unseasonably warm April day when Charlotte Davis set off to run the Boston Marathon this past spring. About halfway through the 26.2-mile race, her body was screaming for her to stop, but her head had other ideas, especially after she spotted some familiar faces in the crowd.

One of them was Forrest Allen, her Middleburg neighbor and long-time friend from the days when both attended The Hill School. Allen had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a snowboarding accident in 2011 but had made great progress after numerous surgeries and grueling rehabilitations, including the innovative music therapy program offered at Middleburg’s “A Place to Be” that allowed him to regain his voice.

And now, with more than 13 miles to go, one of the main reasons she was running that day—Forrest Allen—was waving at her from a group that also included his mother, Rae, his service dog, Tolliver, and Charlotte’s parents, Jim and Shannon Davis.

“I was definitely hurting,” Charlotte said. “But after seeing Forrest and everyone else, I guess I fell out of my body and the training started to kick in. The fact that they had all come up to see me came into my head. That really pushed me, and they were there at the finish line, too. I got a big hug from Forrest.”

Davis is a 25-year-old Princeton graduate who played four years of varsity lacrosse for the Tigers. She now lives in Boston and works as an analyst for BlackRock, an American global investment management corporation that is the world’s largest asset manager, with over $4.5 trillion in assets under management.

She joined the firm in 2014 and soon learned that the infamous Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 had hit very close to her workplace. Joseph Craven, who ran Boston’s BlackRock office, had a son, J.P., who was 12 feet away from the first of two terrorist bombs that went off near the Boylston Street finish line. J.P. was there to watch his father finish the race and suffered burns and a severe head injury that day.

Transported to the Boston Medical Center (BMC), he underwent three surgeries, but miraculously recovered well enough to run in the 2014 Boston Marathon himself to help raise funds for the hospital. A year later, a dozen runners in BlackRock’s Boston office, including Charlotte Davis, decided to enter the 2015 Boston Marathon in order to continue those donations. And Charlotte had an equally altruistic goal: she wanted to do the same for A Place to Be.

Using various social media tools as well as informing her vast network of friends and family about what she had in mind, Davis raised $13,000 for BMC that year, and she and her family matched it with the same amount for A Place to Be. This year, she did it again, raising $18,000, with another family match for Middleburg’s APTB.

In mid-June, Charlotte came home for a Middleburg visit and, along with Forrest and Tolliver, stopped by at APTB’s summer theater camp at Hill School. She wore the medal she got for finishing the Boston race, and Forrest had the 2015 medal draped around his neck as well. When she was introduced by director Tom Sweitzer, she got a spirited ovation “that just blew me away.”

“I was very humbled when I walked through the door,” she said. “The impact of what I did was really palpable to me. You don’t realize it until it happens. It was pretty overwhelming.”

And so was that weekend before the marathon. Forrest and his mother came up on Friday evening and on Sunday, they all went to an Episcopal church service where the minister asked anyone who was running in the marathon the next day to stand up.

“Forrest stood up with me,” she said. “It was great.”

Davis said she always ran to stay in shape for lacrosse but had never even thought about doing a marathon until the 2015 race. She trained for this year’s event by running about 40 miles a week starting last January and finished in a more-than-respectable four hours and six minutes. That was 18 minutes faster than her time the previous year, despite the less than ideal 75-degree temperatures.

And next year?

“Ask me in a couple more weeks,” she said, smiling. “I really don’t consider myself a runner. I consider myself a survivor.”

Just like J.P. Craven and Forrest Allen.