Milwaukee Police Inspector and husband ran Boston Marathon

MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- Milwaukee Police Inspector Carianne Yerkes is back on the job, but is asking a lot of questions after she experienced the bombings at the Boston Marathon firsthand.

Yerkes was one of the runners.

"Myself and my husband, we were running the marathon together. We were at mile 25-and-a-half when all of a sudden we realized something was wrong. We could tell something was wrong just by looking at the police officers along the route. They had very serious looks on their faces. All had their microphones -- their radios right to their ear, and you could just tell that something had changed.  We got a little bit farther when all of a sudden all of the people in front of us had stopped and there were people now running towards us," Yerkes said.

Yerkes describes the scene as chaotic, and said she was exhausted after nearly completing the marathon.

Someone told Yerkes and those around her that there had been an explosion. Yerkes says they hadn't heard anything because the course with all the spectators is very loud.

Yerkes says she and her husband who is also a police officer went into law enforcement mode.

"Our first instinct is to get off the course and try to get as far away from the area as we could. There wasn't anything that we could do where we were at to help, so all we wanted to do was then try to get out of the area," Yerkes said.

Finally, Yerkes was able to get some information about what had happened.

"While my cell phone wasn't working to make calls out I did receive a telephone call from someone from the police department here asking me was I okay, who then gave me some information as to what was going on," Yerkes said.

The Yerkes' goal was to finish the marathon in four hours. That would have put them in the finish line area when the explosions occurred. However, they just happened to slow down.

"It's funny how things work that way," Yerkes said.