Louis, 40, said he’s been running his entire life, but this would have been his first Boston Marathon.
“In some sense, it was a relief,” he said. “We just have so many more important things in the world and in our own lives directly that need our attention right now and our focus.”
Most of his 126 employees had to go on unemployment.
“You can’t afford to keep people on, even though you want to,” he said. “When there’s no revenue coming in, but you still have bills to pay there’s only so much anybody can do.”
Louis said he came up with the idea on his treadmill last month after getting his biannual infusion for an autoimmune disease. The treatment is tough on his body, so he went for a run “to shake the funk off.”
“What if I do this? I’m on my treadmill at home. This is the whole mindset — stay home, be by yourself, quarantine, social distance,” he recalled thinking. “I was going to run Boston. What if I said still do it, and do it as a fundraiser for all these employees that are out of work?”
Louis set up a GoFundMe page that he said brought in $8,000 on the first day.
“It was really, really kind that so many people got behind it and wanted to be part of it, especially in a time where everybody’s struggling, everybody’s tight with their money and even people that have money are watching it closely,” he said. “Nobody has expendable income right now that they can just be throwing at things.”
Louis knew that running 26.2 miles on a treadmill was going to be tough, so he decided to change his pace every two miles to divide the challenge into 13 more manageable segments.
Louis set off at 11:13 a.m. on Monday, his scheduled start time, and had a list of landmarks on the race course so he could imagine passing the Natick Town Hall and running through the Wellesley College “Scream Tunnel.”
He thought about raising his treadmill’s incline when he got to the famous “Heartbreak Hill,” but decided not to at the last minute.
“I don’t think I would have been able to just do 26 miles straight without a without a mental plan. It’s just it’s too daunting. I don’t even want to think about it,” he said.
Louis streamed portions of his run on Facebook Live and some of his restaurant staff surprised him by coming to cheer outside his house during the second half of the race.
His mom, who lives next door, got a kick out of that and brought water to the spectators.
“I thought that was really cool that they showed up and that was very helpful,” he said. “I didn’t have thousands of people on Heartbreak Hill, but I did have a couple of people, and knowing they were standing out there, it was definitely helpful.”
He ended up finishing the race in 3:32 and was pretty happy with his time.
The fundraiser brought in almost $20,000 and he’s deciding how to distribute it to his staff. Louis said he wants the money to go to the employees that need it the most.
He plans to run the race for real in September.