There is something quietly radical about running 26.2 miles when the world has told you that you cannot. The three runners profiled ahead of the New York City Marathon remind us that the long run is rarely about speed or splits; it is a private reckoning with limitation, stigma, and grief. That is the kind of endurance that deserves our attention, not the leaderboard. For those of us who have ever felt our bodies betray us, whether through illness, diagnosis, or the slow erosion of confidence, these stories land with a particular resonance. They echo the sentiment we explored in Living With Crohn's Without Performing Strength, where the act of showing up becomes the truest form of strength, not the performance of it.
Nicole Ver Kuilen spent a decade running on a prosthesis that was never built for the force her body demanded. Her insurance covered walking, not running, an arbitrary line that kept her from the most basic physical freedom. She had to complete a 1,500-mile triathlon to be noticed by a charity that finally donated a running leg. That detail stops us cold. No one should have to prove their worth through a feat of extreme endurance just to access the equipment that allows them to move. Her work with Forrest Stump to push for insurance coverage of athletic prosthetics is not merely admirable; it is necessary. Smita Rajgopal's story asks us to reconsider what we see when we look at a marathoner. She is an entrepreneur, an aerial circus artist, and a woman living with bipolar disorder who was hospitalized after a psychiatric episode earlier this year. She thought the marathon was lost. Instead, she rebuilt her training one mile at a time, drawing a direct line between the wall of a race and the wall of a mental health crisis. Her willingness to name both publicly is a form of quiet authority that dismantles stigma without theatrics.
Shaden Awad carries something heavier than a hydration belt. She runs as the child of Palestinian refugees, aware that the 26.2 miles she will cover is longer than the entire length of Gaza. She does not separate running from politics, nor should she. Her presence on the course is an act of planting for the future, rooted in a Palestinian proverb about a man who plants olive trees for generations he will never meet. That image stays with us. It reframes the marathon not as a personal achievement but as an investment in visibility and legacy. For our readers who have ever felt that their identity or history makes them too complicated to be seen in spaces of wellness and sport, Awad's stance offers a clear, specific takeaway: you do not have to leave your story at the starting line. The most powerful runs are the ones that carry the weight of something larger than the runner themselves.
As the New York City Marathon approaches its 50th anniversary, we are left with a question that lingers beyond the finish line. How many more runners are out there, right now, making do with inadequate tools, unspoken diagnoses, or histories that demand to be carried? The quiet power of the long run is not in the distance. It is in the decision to keep moving when the system, the stigma, or the grief says stop.