Andrea Peet had just passed the 11th mile of the 2020 Mississippi Blues Marathon when she felt an abrupt jolt. She’d already steered around several potholes on the course, but she had seen this one too late.
Andrea Peet, who lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, recovers after participating in the Brooklyn marathon on April 24, 2022.
Peet, 41, didn’t start running until she was 29. Her first run — on a treadmill — was only 15 minutes. But she found it exhilarating. She signed up for a few races and added biking and swimming to her workouts to train for triathlons. In August 2014, a Johns Hopkins neurologist confirmed what she and David had suspected: Peet had ALS. Life expectancy for someone with ALS is two to five years, and there is no cure. She was 33.
“It changed everything,” Peet said. She described the race atmosphere as “a laser filled with the very best of humanity, aimed directly at me.” ALS causes muscles to atrophy, leading to eventual paralysis and the inability to swallow, speak, and breathe. But after Peet lost her ability to walk independently and speak clearly, her subsequent disease progression has been slow, said Dr. Richard Bedlack, her ALS physician at Duke University.
As April turned to May and May to June, Peet was restless. Each day, she rode her trike around her cul-de-sac. In June 2020, she completed the Tri-State Trek, a 270-mile race held virtually instead of on its usual route from Boston to Greenwich, Connecticut, circling round and round that 0.1-mile loop.
So the day before the famed race, she and David loaded their car and drove to the start line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. The 26.2-mile course was marked in preparation for the next morning, but the roads were still open. Three friends would cycle alongside Peet, and another would drive behind them with the car’s hazard lights flashing.
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