Janet Guidi, 62, of Harrison, Maine, loves her job as a finish line volunteer at the Boston Marathon. She’s been doing it for 17 consecutive years, and there have been high points—she gave Tedy Bruschi his medal one year—and low ones—she was about 300 yards from where the first bomb exploded at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

But this year, she experienced something new. As she was presenting a medal to one runner (“because that’s what we do, we present them,” Guidi said), the runner looked her in the eye and told her she had something for her. Guidi and the runner posed for a photo together, Guidi placed the small card the runner had handed her in her pocket and didn’t look at it until hours later.

When she finally had a chance to take a look, she was moved. It was a small, handmade card, and on the inside it said, “Thank you for cheering me on! #26.2milesofgratitude Just paying it forward.” Attached to the note was a $20 bill which, weeks later, Guidi still has not removed.

Guidi ran the Boston Marathon once, in 1998, and she still runs many road races. She told Runner’s World by phone that she can’t wait to do something similar and pay it forward in her next race.

“I also put it on Facebook and I’ve had an unbelievable response, people saying, ‘I can’t wait to do something similar,’” Guidi said. “So it has gone way beyond just me receiving it. I can’t tell you how many people have responded to say, ‘I can’t wait to do that myself,’ [and] I can’t either.”

Who was that mystery runner? Her name is Cindy Petrovits and she lives in Pleasant Valley, New York. She was running her first Boston Marathon, for which she qualified on her sixth try, and she was thrilled to be a part of this year’s race.

Petrovits, 45, told Runner’s World by phone that the idea came to her while she was tapering for the race. She’d never done anything like it, and she had never heard of anyone doing anything like it.

“You know when you taper, you get a little kooky,” Petrovits said. “I was just so excited to be running Boston and was like, ‘I wish I could thank every single person out there.’”

Initially, she thought she might try to carry 26 cards and hand one out every mile, but then she realized it would be hard to carry that many, not to mention expensive. So she settled on five. Petrovits, a high school art teacher, handed the cards out to people who caught her attention along the way. They had different messages on the outside, such as, “You make me happy!” and “I think you’re awesome!” but they were the same on the inside, and each contained a $20 bill.

Petrovits handed the first one to a teenage girl around mile 6 or 7. “She and her friends were just having a ton of fun,” Petrovits said. She gave another to someone who noticed her name on her shirt and “was really obnoxious, but funny” in his cheering.

She gave the third one to a woman she would later learn was named Sharon, at a water stop around mile 15. Sharon refilled Petrovits’s water bottle for her. Because Petrovits included her bib number in the cards, Sharon was able to track her down that evening via Facebook to thank her and let Petrovits know she would be paying it forward as well.

She gave her last on-course card to a group of people handing out roses along the course, near mile 21. She took a rose (which she carried to the finish and still has) and left a card. As a result of that one, she recently received a message from a woman in Arizona, named Katie, who told her she would be paying it forward as well.

Petrovits decided that she would hand her final card to the person who gave her her medal, just beyond the finish line.

“When I turned onto Boylston Street, I wished I had 26 of them, because I wanted to give every police officer one of them,” Petrovits said.

Petrovits crossed the finish line in 4:01:31, a little more than 10 minutes off her personal best, but she was running this one more for the experience than trying to hit a time.

Petrovits told no one, other than her husband and one friend, about the cards, and when she posted a post-race photo gallery on Facebook, she made no mention of it.

After her exchange with Guidi at the finish line, Petrovits spotted a Chipotle and made a beeline for the restaurant. When she asked for a soda and went to pay for it, the people working told her it was on the house. So after she got home, Petrovits made two more cards and mailed them to the Chipotle on Boylston Street.

She enclosed a photo of herself standing outside the restaurant and addressed one card to “the girl working the counter” and the other to “the guy working the register” on race day.

Petrovits says she wished she could have thanked more people along the course on race day.

“They’re the ones that really get you to the finish, because they’re cheering you on, and they’re part of it, for me, at least,” she said.

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