Stride of his life
Man with HIV turns to marathons to improve his health
AROUND mile 20. That’s when it always seems to happen. The wall. Every marathon runner knows it, that moment in a race when the body wants to quit and the mind has to tell it otherwise.
Ryan Romero hit it the hardest about two years ago.
Flashback to November 2018: Romero is taking part in his first Las Vegas Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon. He had just started running that April and had never attempted such a long distance before that chilly fall day. Three-quarters of the way through came the wall.
“The last 6 miles were rough,” Romero recalls, practically shuddering from the memory. “I had to walk a few pieces of it. But I just knew that I was going to get there.”
Romero called his parents during his slowdown. They were waiting at the finish line. He’d join them there soon enough.
The Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon wasn’t just a race, it was the beginning of a major physical transformation for the 26-year-old who turned his health around in remarkable fashion a mile at a time. A year later, one marathon would begat 10, as Romero crisscrossed North America in races from here to Montreal, changing his body and his life.
In 2016, while an undergrad at UNLV majoring in hospitality, Romero was diagnosed with HIV. He gained weight and struggled with high blood pressure. Then in April 2018, when he weighed about 220 pounds, Romero decided to do something about it.
He decided to go running.
‘I barely made it’
He buys three pairs of identical shoes every holiday season.
“Those are my shoes for the year,” Romero explains. “If I get through all three pairs in a year, that’s my goal. Typically, you put 300 to 500 miles on a shoe.”
Currently, he’s on his second pair.
“I’ll probably retire these this month or the next month,” Romero notes.
It’s a long way from four years ago, when Romero was 70 pounds heavier.
After his HIV diagnosis, he began to add weight, most likely because of a combination of the medication he was prescribed and the stress of completing his senior year at UNLV, Romero believes.
After a visit to the doctor in which his health issues came into stark relief, Romero knew he had to do something about it. He was only 22.
“I decided, ‘Maybe I should just go running,’ ” he says.
Why?
“Probably the fact that I did not like it at all. I was not a runner at all,” he chuckles. “Also, I did not know what to do in the gym, so I was like, ‘Well, with running, you can literally just go outside and go.’ ”
Go, he did, using training apps to work toward running a half-marathon as part of the Las Vegas Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon later in the year.
Before the event, Romero joined the St. Jude Heroes program, where race participants raise money for the children’s hospital and, in turn, their entry fees are waived.
When Romero registered for the Las Vegas half-marathon, St. Jude’s representatives told him that if he raised another $100, he could enter to run the full marathon.
“I was like, ‘Sure, let’s go,’ ” Romero says. “So, literally the day before I was going to run a half-marathon, I decided, ‘What’s another 13.1 miles?’
“It wasn’t something I really trained for,” Romero adds. “It was, ‘I know I put my body through a huge change — let’s try this out, see if I can make it.’ I barely made it.”
Upon finishing the race and receiving his medal, Romero noticed a fellow racer with an even bigger medal.
“I asked, ‘What’s that?’ ” he recalls. “She’s like, ‘If you do 15 races with Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in one year, you get this giant Hall of Fame med
al.’ And that’s what I decided to do.”
A marathon of marathons
His best time came during the worst conditions.
Three hours, 58 minutes and 26 seconds.
That’s Romero’s fastest marathon, turned in on a snowy, rainy March day in Washington, D.C.
After completing his first marathon in 2018, Romero went on a tear the following year, running in more than a dozen Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon events.
“I signed up for all of them,” he says. “I literally did every single one in the country. It was pretty much a race a month, sometimes every other week. It was chaotic.”
By the end of 2019, he’d racked up some impressive numbers.
“I ran 10 full (marathons), six halfs, like 20 5Ks, sometimes a 10K,” says Romero, who now weighs around 155 pounds. “I don’t think the body is designed to run 10 full marathons in a year.”
He tackled the hilly terrain of Seattle, the dizzying heat of Arizona, the high altitude of Denver.
“I went into the running world knowing nothing: ‘Oh, you just go outside and run,’ ” he says. “You think you know how to run, but you don’t. There’s a whole process behind it. There’s a huge learning curve.”
As part of his near-daily training regimen, Romero now runs an average of 100 miles per month.
It’s become as much of a mental exercise as a physical one.
“You just have to go into a different mindset,” he says of the rigors of getting through a marathon. “Music is what really, really guides me,” he adds, noting that he’s especially fond of songs from musicals.
With coronavirus concerns postponing most Rock ’n’ Roll Marathons this year, Romero has taken to the Rock ’n’ Roll Virtual Running Club, where participants sign up on the company’s website (runrocknrollvr.com) and race remotely via running apps.
A native of Southern California, Romero came to Las Vegas to attend UNLV, where he was student body vice president, homecoming king and a graduation speaker and now works as an admissions counselor after getting a master’s in higher education at the university.
Running hasn’t just transformed his life, it’s become a way of life.
“My whole body literally changed,” he says. “I was Hiv-positive. Most people see that as a hindrance in life, and I saw that as an opportunity to go and do more. I took control of my life.”