Story by Maeve Sheehey
It was like ice skating through the milky way.
Her legs moved across the flat desert land without her needing to command them. The pitch black Arizona sky was playing tricks that morning — the stars looked about as close as the runners around her.
Sally Kuehn, a then-20-year-old marathoner, was cruising through Phoenix at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday in early February 2020.
Her friends were all a couple thousand miles away, back in Chapel Hill. A student at the University of North Carolina, Kuehn was willing to leave the weekend of the Duke-UNC basketball game, missing the fanfare surrounding the rivalry faceoff, to run in Arizona.
“That’s how dedicated I was to running this specific race,” she said.
“Hitting the wall” is a common pre-race warning, and something distance runners come to expect in a marathon. Kuehn felt it in her last three races — the energy and motivation knocked out of her like she’d sprinted into a slab of concrete. She expected to hit that point in Phoenix, too.
The first part of the course was downhill, so Kuehn’s legs carried her easily. And she was still sailing when the sun came up. And by the time she got to mile 20, she literally couldn’t stop smiling.
Her dad, Jake, had been darting around the course to cheer for her at nearly every mile. He ran by her side when she got to the 25th-mile mark, and turning the final corner, they both knew she’d beaten her personal record — “by a lot.”
As Kuehn finished the 26.2 miles, the clock confirmed what she already knew. 3:19:48. It was her fourth-ever marathon, and she’d qualified for her ultimate goal: Boston.
If running really is a metaphor for life, as Olympic silver medalist Meb Keflezighi famously put it, the Boston Marathon is the afterlife for many marathoners. It’s something to live for, something to wake up for, something to obsess over while lying in bed at night.
Yes, Kuehn was on her way to the peak of distance running, the marathon on most serious runners’ dream boards. No wall in sight.
And then the pandemic happened.
***
The whole “marathon thing” started as a bucket list line item. She played soccer and tennis in high school in Lakeville, Connecticut, and joined the club soccer team when she got to UNC. With competitive matches and travel taking up much of her fall semester, spring became her off-season.
Until she decided to run her first marathon.
Her mom, Tracy, was a bit surprised when Sally said she wanted to break into distance running. They were an athletic family, sure, but certainly not the type to run double-digit miles just for fun. Still, always supportive of her daughter’s whims and projects, Tracy made a sign out of poster board and joined her in Virginia Beach for her first marathon in March 2018.
Tracking Sally on her phone and jogging to each mile marker to cheer got harder as the race went on, and Tracy started to realize her daughter was slowing down. Sally finished the race, but not anywhere close to the “very aggressive goal” of four hours that she had for herself.
A week later, she was diagnosed with mono and bronchitis.
“I’m amazed that having mono, she was able to complete a marathon,” Tracy said.
Running 26.2 miles with an infection characterized by excessive fatigue might ruin marathon running for some runners, but not Kuehn. She signed up for a second race, then a third, then a fourth, when she didn’t make her Boston qualifying time. She upped her speed work and her mileage. What started as something to cross off her bucket list was now officially an obsession.
Two years later in March 2020, just a month after finally qualifying for Boston during that Arizona race, Kuehn’s university sent students home to quarantine due to Covid-19. She didn’t stop running then, either.
Kuehn didn’t know how long Covid-19 would be part of her daily life, but as the half marathons and 10K races she planned to run got canceled, she kept up a 50- to 55-mile-a-week training regimen.
Running gave Kuehn a sense of structure during quarantine. She didn’t know what would happen in the world — nobody did — but at least she had a daily run to build her schedule around, something consistent to rely on.
“It’s one of those things that you have complete control over,” she said.
Every day when she ran, she could see herself getting better. And when a global pandemic left her without much else to do, she cherished the pride running gave her.
She threw herself into running, hard, and appreciated it as the only thing that gave her life structure during quarantine. She got her speed up and became faster than she’d ever been.
And then she got an overuse injury.
Here’s the thing about running 50 to 55 miles a week without training for races: you don’t get the natural breaks of tapering or taking a couple days off after a distance event. It was a lesson Kuehn now had a throbbing IT band, the piece of connective tissue that runs down the outside of the leg, to remind her of.
Kuehn went stir crazy when she couldn’t run. Part of her worried that with her injury, she couldn’t stay in the running shape she’d worked so hard to build up over quarantine. Part of her was sick of doing HIIT workouts — high-intensity training that kept her in shape but didn’t quite live up to the absolute freedom of running — every day. And every part of her missed it.
It was the summer before her senior year and everything was already uncertain. She didn’t know whether the pandemic would prevent students from going back to UNC, or whether she’d get to run Boston, the race she’d watched hours of Youtube videos about, in April.
And now, she had IT band syndrome keeping her from doing the one thing that consistently got her out of bed.
***
Kuehn isn’t the only runner who’s turned to her sport to help cope with quarantine. COVID-19 has left runners with fewer races to look forward to and, in large part, more time to run. Nowhere is this clearer than Greensboro, N.C., where a group of runners decided to break the world record for the longest continuous relay.
Olivia Romine, another UNC student, participated with her mother in the 5,000-mile event, which took place over 28 days with about 50 people. They’d sign up for a shift and arrive at a local high school track no more than five minutes before it started, to avoid contact with other runners.
Romine remembers a Friday night in April, rounding the track at 11 p.m., nothing around her but stars and a radical sense of quiet. During a month when she saw absolutely no one but her family, outside the occasional Zoom call, running gave her a sense of calm and grounding when nothing else quite could.
“It was just just a fun way to give us all motivation and goals, since all of our events had gotten canceled,” she said.
Unfortunately for Kuehn, marathons aren’t quite as forgiving as relay races.
The whole nature of them, bringing runners from around the world to pant on a packed course for 26.2 miles, makes it especially uncertain when they will resume.
Boston Marathon organizers also haven’t announced whether they’ll let runners keep their qualifying times for an extra year. As of now, Kuehn’s qualification will only last until April 2021 — meaning if the race doesn’t happen as planned, she might have to do it all again.
The training. The registration fees. The events. All of it.
But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to give up — IT band syndrome or not.
These days, she can be found running up and down the steps of a now-empty Kenan Memorial Stadium to keep in shape. Gone are the 50-mile weeks that characterized quarantine. Instead, she’s focusing on strength training and keeping her mileage low to stay healthy.
Kuehn still dreams of Boston. As she says, “that’s where the pros go.” She still wants to run with the fastest people in the world at the oldest marathon in the world, past the colonial buildings and rickety tram and cobblestone streets that characterize the city.
She doesn’t know when she’ll get there. She also doesn’t know when classes will return to normal or what the world will look like once she graduates, but it’s probably safe to say things will be uncertain for a while.
Kuehn didn’t hit the wall during her fourth marathon, but in just a couple months, the world around her did. Still, unsurprisingly, the woman who ran through mono isn’t ready to give up the goals she set for herself.
Running is all about perseverance, and Sally Kuehn is still running.
