It's hard to think that it's three years since the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed 3 people and injured an estimated 264 others when two pressure cooker bombs went off close to the finish line at the annual race.

The attack, and subsequent manhunt for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, will live long in the memories of both the city's residents and those who watched the events unfold across the world.

As part of The Right Hook's broadcast from Boston College this week, George managed to speak with some of those who attended the race and saw what happened that day in April 2013.

David Power, originally from Waterford, was running the marathon that day and visiting Boston with his family. He described to George how he was eating a meal in a restaurant just a few hundred meters from the finish line when the bomb went off.

"We thought it was a fire alarm or another incident, like [the police] were chasing security down the street", he said. "It took an hour before we actually knew what had happened. People sitting back at home on the internet or watching TV knew more than we did."

He remembers being told by police just to walk away from Boston city centre, away from where there could potentially be more bombs. 

"Luckily I was with my family and we were together. But there were people who were running the race who got to mile 20, and the police shut the street. People were wandering around in shorts and t-shirts with no way to get home."

George also spoke with Chris Cassidy, a reporter with the Boston Herald, who was also running that day. Chris describes the day of the 2013 marathon as a "picture perfect, sunny day". He was only a couple of hundred meters from the finish line when he heard a loud explosion and saw smoke in the area, which he also mistook for something else.

"At first we thought it was cannon fire or a military celebration. We had no idea it was a terrorist attack" he said.

That changed after the second bomb went off, however. "I turned around and could see a trash can that was completely blown away; you could see the devastation and at that point everyone knew that this was a bomb or a terrorist attack."

But Chris also recalls how the people of Boston began to show their determination not to let the terrorists win:

"Within a few hours, you started seeing the best of people in Boston, whether it was the first responses or the business in the city coming together to raise money for the victims' families."

The result, he thinks, is more people coming to see the race in the last few years and more money being raised as a result.

"It's a resilient city, and that's really the country as well after terrorism."

Click below to listen to both interviews in full: