Story by Guillermo Molero
Photography by Ronan Brown
It’s 5 a.m. on a Sunday. The sun isn’t up.
Hannah Collett is. She has been for a while.
She and her girlfriend had to be there early to make their way through the crowds at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, in unseasonable heat and humidity, and inch ever closer to the starting line of the New York City Marathon. She would start running at 10 a.m.
She’s not thinking about how she got there. She’s not thinking about her heart condition. She’s not thinking about the unsuccessful surgeries and the uncertainty on whether she’s actually OK, whether she’s risking her life by doing what she loves.
The only thing she’s thinking about is 26.2 miles away. And in a few hours’ time, she’s going to cross it.
MILE 1
Hannah started running in the summer before she started high school to get into better shape. She thought it was awful, but the more she ran, the more she learned to appreciate how awful it was.
And even though she didn’t love it yet, she wanted to get better at it.
One evening that July, she heard her dad mention to her mom that he’d just run 4.8 miles. She’d never run more than three, but once she heard him say that, she knew she had to run five.
She left home at 1 p.m. and started running. She didn’t take any water. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going. She didn’t say how long she’d be gone. She just ran.
“I’m so stubborn, it’s just crazy,” Hannah said. “I’m an all-or-nothing person. Either 100 percent of my effort is going into something or zero percent. And when I’m in it, I’m in it.”
And when it came to running, she was in it.
Hannah ran five miles that day. She gradually improved her stamina throughout her high school years and her arrival at UNC-Chapel Hill. Now, she easily clears five miles a day. She ran almost three times as much in the weeks leading up to today’s race.
Those miles are far less taxing than the one she just ran to cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Usually reserved for automotive traffic, its six lanes were cluttered with brightly colored running jerseys like the neon-yellow one she’s wearing. They gleamed in the sun, which by then had been up for hours.
As she made her way into Brooklyn, she wasn’t worried about how she was doing. Despite the 250-foot elevation gain of the bridge, she was still only a few miles in. She’d done that before, and she could do it again. She had to.
Instead, she thought about who was coming up behind her.
She thought, “How’s Spence doing?”
MILE 7
Hannah is often joined on her runs by Spencer Higgins, her girlfriend of more than one-and-a-half years. And today’s run is no different. Spencer was slated to start in a different wave and doesn’t have the pace to keep up with her partner, so Hannah won’t be seeing her until after the race.
Spencer herself is no fan of running, and she usually tags along for Hannah’s longer treks on her bike, bringing along water and snacks to help replenish Hannah’s energy.
On Oct. 7, 2021, Hannah and Spencer embarked on another of their normal training sessions on Hooker Fields at UNC, this time in preparation for Hannah’s inaugural marathon in Durham at the end of the month. It was a lighter run than usual for Hannah, Spencer recalled, but suddenly Hannah stopped.
“Catch me,” Hannah said.
Spencer helped her to the ground.
“Feel my pulse.”
Her heart was beating fast — too fast. It felt more like the heart rate of a rabbit or a baby bird, Spencer said. It didn’t feel human. And, as a former EMT, she’d know.
The two of them weren’t sure what to make of the incident, though, figuring it must have been brought on by fatigue. So, after waiting a while, she started again, continuing to prepare for the marathon that Halloween.
Hannah posted a respectable time for an amateur, clocking in at just over five hours and eight minutes. At 19, she was the youngest competitor in the field.
She continued to run, but there were still issues. What happened in October happened again. And again. And again. After consulting her girlfriend and her parents, Kelly and Rich Collett, Hannah made an appointment to see a cardiologist on her native Long Island in mid-December.
She was more confused than nervous, but she didn’t realize the scope of the problem. To her, it was just fatigue.
Nothing to worry about.
Her parents didn’t know either, so they let Hannah go to her appointment alone — a decision Kelly says they soon came to regret.
Hannah was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which is a rare congenital condition in which the heart has an extra electrical signaling pathway according to Dr. Julian Barcena, a Miami-based cardiologist who, while he never treated Hannah, has more than 23 years of experience in the field.
He said that extra pathway creates competition with the electrical impulses that regulate a person’s heartbeat, compounding their effect. Where a normal person would have a heartbeat of around 100 to 120 beats per minute, Hannah’s could easily clear 200 — especially when she is exercising.
Hannah got the phone number of a surgeon that same day and passed it along to her parents. Her surgery was set to take place two weeks later.
“We had no idea how this all worked,” Kelly said. “We didn’t know what it would be or if she was going to be OK. We just didn’t know at that point in time. It was just a very scary little while.”
Actually, she was terrified. They all were.
MILE 13
As she crossed the Pulaski Bridge to move from Brooklyn to Queens, she was finally back home on Long Island.
The heat was much worse by now, climbing to a 75-degree peak that felt even hotter because of the 70% humidity. It was the third hottest New York City Marathon ever, and the hottest since the race date was pushed back to November in the hopes of ensuring cooler temperatures on race day.
It was far worse than Hannah had expected.
After her first heart surgery on Jan. 3, 2022, Hannah would get the news that her condition was far worse than she had expected, too.
Normally, Barcenas said, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome affects young children and can be easily treated through a cardiac ablation, the scarring of heart tissue to block off alternate electrical pathways.
These ablations were surgical procedures, but they were relatively simple. Hannah’s cardiologist had blocked off about 40 minutes for hers. It took almost 90.
Her doctor targeted the accessory pathway that he thought was causing her heartbeat to skyrocket, the one that usually causes Wolff-Parkinson-White. She hadn’t been cured. In fact, her doctor said the extra pathway her heart was so rare, it was in a part of the heart doctors rarely look at, something a doctor can only find out midway through the procedure. And it was different than any other, dangerous — so dangerous that the likelihood it would cause sudden cardiac death jumped from 1-in-200 to 1-in-20. And if that were to ever happen, there would be no saving her.
Just a month earlier, Hannah had gotten into a fight with her parents about whether she should keep running. To them, it was a no-brainer. Every time she went on a run would only increase the strain she was putting on her already belabored heart. If their daughter took one step too many, it might be her last.
It was a no-brainer for her, too. Running was the thing Hannah could always turn to. No matter where or when, she would always be able to put on her shoes and feel a breeze push against her. She would always be able to escape reality, leaving behind thoughts and problems that ailed her. She would always be able to be herself, all by herself — and that’s where she longed to be.
So, after a tentative clearance from her doctor, she started running again. By then, she said, he didn’t have enough evidence to prevent her from running. But he didn’t have enough evidence to rule out any risk at all either.
On June 1, doctors were hopeful they could finally put this all behind her by performing a second cardiac ablation.
“If she had WPW and the accessory pathway was concealed, which is part of the success of the treatment, then she should be able to return and have a normal life,” Barcena said.
But the truth is, they didn’t know if it had worked.
After the surgery, her electrocardiogram results were promising. She hadn’t had an incident like last year’s since the spring. But her cardiologist still refused to rule out the possibility that the pathway he tried to seal off was still working, waiting, as Hannah feared, for the worst possible time to strike. Not knowing was almost worse than knowing, she said.
But she wasn’t going to let that stop her. Nothing could stop her.
MILE 20
“I hurt sm.”
That was the text Hannah sent to a few of her friends back at school once she made it to the Bronx, shortening “so much” to not drop her phone as she ran. And the turn southward onto Fifth Avenue only made things worse.
The sweat pooled under her eyebrows and hairline, dripping into the collar of her jersey. She was hot, almost as though she had a fever. She felt the same sharp pain in her right foot she’d felt when she ran a marathon last year, which would later be attributed to a stress fracture. Her legs, barely keeping her afloat, were shaking after carrying her through most of the race’s 810 feet of elevation gain and 824 feet of elevation loss. Her lungs were desperate for every last bit of air they could find.
But even through all that, she couldn’t help but smile.
“Well, at least I’m not taking the bus,” she thought.
Spencer said Hannah usually tells jokes to try and cope with the difficult circumstances she faces, especially her diagnosis with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. But Spencer knows the condition is no laughing matter. She knows Hannah needs to run to find herself, but she always wishes there could be some other way.
“It’s more like, ‘Don’t let yourself think about it and keep making jokes.’ It’s a facade,” she said. “But, statistically speaking, running more increases the amount of time your heart beats. And increasing the number of heartbeats increases the likelihood that it’ll just stop.”
Hannah says she always hears about how well she’s handling the situation, even from doctors.
But she’s not.
She says she’s handling it poorly.
There are times when she can’t help but think about how she went from finishing a marathon and being in the best shape of her life to being diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. About how she doesn’t know where she and her heart actually stand after an inconclusive surgery. About the chances, slim or not, that she might never see her family or friends again.
And it’s so hard for her to think about how there’s nothing to be done about it. Every time she does, she feels like whatever god might exist — despite not believing one does — is out to get her, taunting her by threatening to take away everything she knows and loves.
It makes her angry. But more than that, it just hurts. So, she says she tries not to dwell on it for too long.
But how could she not?
She had been training to race in New York City ever since doctors cleared her to run, and the thought snuck its way into her head almost every time she laced up her running shoes.
She says she doesn’t want her condition to be the reason she doesn’t run the marathon. She doesn’t want to give her heart the satisfaction.
“I know I had the heart condition when I ran the last marathon, but it doesn’t feel like that, in a way,” Hannah said in the weeks before the marathon. “Now, I’m two heart surgeries deep, and I want to cross the finish line of my next 26.2 and prove to everybody — and, I guess, mostly to myself — that I’m OK.”
MILE 26
She was almost there.
The dull gray of Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers gave way to the lush greens, yellows and oranges of Central Park. The harsh sunlight that had been reflected onto her by glass facade after glass facade was now obscured by a canopy of trees overhead.
She felt herself getting emotional, as the impossible dream became a reality — her reality.
She spotted a patch of Carolina blue in the grandstands. Her dad, who, standing alongside her mom and her aunt and uncle, was waving a UNC flag as hard as he could as he saw his daughter’s bright yellow jersey cross the finish line. Tears streamed down both her face and his.
He couldn’t have been more proud.
About an hour later, Hannah was able to parse through the mass of finishers and their families to find him. She joined her family in the grandstand as the sun started to set, to watch Spencer cross the same finish line that she did. The person who had been by Hannah’s side the whole time, who had run with her and laughed with her and cried with her, had just climbed the highest peak of them all with her, too. Hannah just stood there and stared. There weren’t words.
She couldn’t have been more proud.
When Hannah got back to her hotel room, she took a moment to decompress. Her legs, aching for a break, were relieved by a cold shower and a place atop the crumpled white sheets that lined her Sheraton bed.
Distracted, she was fiddling with the wristband on her Apple Watch, which she only just remembered she had been wearing all day. So, she looked through it. When she found her average heart rate during the race, she was taken aback.
170 bpm.
She just kept staring at it.
After all the hot summer days in high school. After falling into her girlfriend’s arms because she couldn’t move. After running her first marathon with a heart condition so rare, her doctor wasn’t even sure if he could fix it. Inconclusive surgery after inconclusive surgery. Through record heat and humidity. Through pain beyond measure.
A heartbeat — her heartbeat — of 170 bpm, just like any other runner.
“I kind of had a moment where I was like, ‘It’s over,’” she said. “And I don’t really know that it’s over, but it felt really, really good to just look at it and have my heartbeat be 170.”
She hadn’t seen it that low in over a year, 12 months where she had been through every emotion imaginable as she tried to stave off the worst thoughts anyone could ever think.
It may not be over yet. But it’s definitely getting better. One step at a time.
