Serena Burla, Second place, 2011 Aramco U.S.A. Half Marathon champs, photo by PhotoRun.net
Burla is one of our top athletes, and what she had to overcome this past year shows us once again, the power of human spirit and how important love and support is for someone facing life’s constant challenges.
I was asked the other day, who I thought could be the big surprise for 2012 in the marathon. Serena Burla is on the short list.
Serena Burla, 2011 Aramco Houston Press Conference, photo by PhotoRun.net.
NEW YORK
(USA): New York Times writes that Dr. Patrick J. Boland, an orthopedic
oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, had
operated on many patients with sarcomas — cancers of soft tissues — but
he had never had a patient like Serena Burla, a 27-year-old elite
distance runner from St. Louis. She had a potentially deadly cancer, a
synovial sarcoma, that arose in and replaced one of the muscles in her
right hamstring. Treatment was to remove that muscle, the biceps muscle
of her hamstring.
Before he operated on Feb. 26, 2010, Boland went to
the medical literature to see if there was any other athlete who had
that hamstring muscle removed, recovered and competed again. He could
not find one, writes New York Times.
She proved it is possible. Last
November she finished 19th in 2:37:06 at NYC Marathon. Burla planned to
run in the New York City Half Marathon on Sunday, but her left hamstring
— the healthy one — hurt a bit on Friday when she was doing a training
workout on a track. She decided to pull out of the race rather than risk
aggravating it.
Serena Burla, Jenn Rhines, 2011 Aramco U.S.A. Half Marathon champs, photo by PhotoRun.net.
