Marathon effort gets runner across finish line
Just three years ago, Houston resident Sagirah Ahmed Norris could not envision walking around her neighborhood without a cane, much less running 26.2 miles.
Ahmed Norris was diagnosed in 2018 with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that affected her ability to move.
Once an avid runner, she noticed her foot dragging. While running her hometown Chicago Marathon, her body throbbed with sharp pains, followed by numbness. A visit to a sports medicine doctor after returning from Chicago linked her struggles to a thyroid problem. But later MRI scans revealed abnormalities in her brain and spinal cord.
“The doctor told me I’d be in a wheelchair in five years and would struggle with walking by the end of the year,” Ahmed Norris said.
Ahmed Norris and her support runner, Kelly Wrobel, made it to California to compete in the San Francisco Marathon this past weekend, with support from deodorant brand Degree.
A friend sent Degree’s call for people who didn’t finish marathons in the past and wanted a second chance to Ahmed Norris. She applied on a whim.
She’s spent the last few months filming and photographing the “Not Done Yet” campaign with the Unilever-owned brand and fellow runners Michael Zampella, a Philadelphia runner with a degenerative eye disease, and Ashley Zirkle, a Florida kidney donor who withdrew from her last marathon following post donor surgery.
“Everyone has their own ‘not done yet’ story,” Ahmed Norris said.
Diagnosis, treatment
When Ahmed Norris’s father died in 2016 from smoking-related complications, it was a wake-up
call for her as a smoker.
“I actually gave up smoking so I could run, replacing it with a better addiction,” she said.
Her multiple sclerosis diagnosis put her running career on pause.
Patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis have immune systems that attack myelin sheaths, which protect the body’s nerve cells. That damages the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, affecting patients’ ability to walk, stay balanced and see. The symptoms progressively worsen as the nerves sustain more damage.
For Ahmed Norris, that looked like drop foot, when the brain fails to send signals to foot muscles to move. She also experienced tremors and sharp pains while on the move.
Steroids did not work. Other medications made her symptoms worse. To get around, she used an e-brace and cane, and at times a wheelchair while traveling.
A treatment known as autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, commonly
referred to as aHSCT, was her last hope. The treatment is still in clinical trials in the U.S. To get aHSCT, Ahmed Norris traveled to Clinica Ruiz in Puebla, Mexico, for a month in January 2020.
MRIs in the two years since she completed treatment showed that her multiple sclerosis has not progressed.
‘Sole sisters’
Since her treatment in Puebla, Ahmed Norris has been in physical therapy to regain use of her muscles.
As a mom of a preteen, Ahmed Norris doesn’t have to work hard to stay active. She also operates two Airbnbs near their home in the Galleria. In her free time, she takes walks around her neighborhood and does at-home exercises prepared by her concierge physical therapist, Dr. Amber Lowe.
Wrobel, Ahmed Norris’ pacer, accompanies her during races. Wrobel is a fellow Houston runner whom she met on Facebook years ago, when they were training for a Disney race.
During runs, Wrobel carries medication and extra water. Her job is to protect Ahmed Norris from overworking and guide her to a safe place so other participants don’t “trample” her during a race.
“Everything is still the athlete doing the physical exertion,” Ahmed Norris said. “Kelly keeps our pace, knows our goals and has three other backup plans.”
Around the time of Ahmed Norris’ diagnosis, she and Wrobel bumped into each other in a marathon runners’ corral and decided to run together. Wrobel noticed her friend struggling during the race and gently encouraged her to keep going.
Ahmed Norris was so grateful for the help, she asked Wrobel, who is originally from Massachusetts, to guide her through the Boston Marathon in 2021.
Ahmed Norris has some tells — her legs will tremble, her balance is thrown off, and to overcome drop foot, she’ll shift her weight to her heels. During one race in 2018, she experienced partial paralysis.
“For someone like Sagirah, it’s watching the signals to make sure they don’t go out too fast or hard,” Wrobel said.
The two traveled to Boston last October and finished with a time of five hours and 58 minutes.
During the race, the drop foot became difficult to overcome and the uphill portion of the marathon aggravated Ahmed Norris’ legs. She relied on Wrobel to get her through the last half of the Boston Marathon.
Ahmed Norris’ solo training for San Francisco included cross-conditioning, plus the occasional bike race. They trained together once or twice a week in the Houston heat.
Degree also set her up with motivational chats with Bachelor Nation star Tyler Cameron, who has run both the Chicago and New York City Marathons.
“While I get to play a small part in her journey by telling her what personally was helpful for me during my marathons, she’s the one doing all the work,” Cameron said in an email.
Cameron, who appeared on Season 15 of “The Bachelorette,” greeted Ahmed Norris, and fellow racers Zampella and Zirkle at the finish line in San Francisco.
The 26.2-mile race took them over the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun rose and seals barked at thousands of runners. Despite tricky inclines — “we don’t have hills in Houston,” Wrobel joked — the duo finished with a time of 5:37:33, a personal record for Ahmed Norris.
She is now training for the London and New York Marathons in October and November, respectively.
“We hit about every goal we set,” Ahmed Norris said.