A Kentucky teenager has completed the Chicago Marathon less than a year after a devastating spinal injury briefly left him paralyzed from the neck down.
Wyatt Anderson, 17, finished Sunday’s Bank of America Chicago Marathon in 3:56:28. Just months earlier, the high school senior was unsure whether he would ever walk again, ABC News reported.
The injury happened last November during a basketball game with friends. Anderson said he tripped while reaching for a rebound and crashed headfirst into a wall.
The collision fractured his spine and left him unable to move.
“I blacked out right after for a little bit, and I couldn’t move any limb on my body,” Anderson told the outlet.
He underwent spinal fusion surgery and spent months in rehabilitation, gradually relearning how to walk.
“Every single day, it was in the back of my head, I was like, ‘Am I gonna walk again? Am I gonna be able to do the same thing that I was doing two weeks ago, a day ago?’” he said.
During therapy, one of Anderson’s rehabilitation specialists told him about a man who completed 50 marathons in 50 states over the course of a year while using a wheelchair.
“That just, like, blew my mind and motivated me,” Anderson said.
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As movement slowly returned through weeks of physical therapy, the story gave him a new objective: not merely to recover, but “to walk or run a marathon within a year.”
Anderson acknowledged that some days offered little reassurance. Still, he focused on the belief that “every day is a step forward” and tried to “just say yes to every opportunity.”
His progress reached an early milestone in April, when he completed the 13.1-mile Kentucky Derby Festival miniMarathon, Spectrum News reported in July.
That half marathon, however, was only a step toward his larger ambition: finishing the Chicago Marathon.
Anderson began Sunday’s race alongside his brother, Jack Anderson, determined not just to reach the finish line but also to encourage people facing their own challenges.
“I hope my story will help other people want to set a lofty goal for themselves and to believe that nothing’s impossible,” he told ABC News.
“[You] can do anything if you set your mind to it — truly, I mean, coming from someone who couldn’t walk at a time and now is running.”
The brothers also used the marathon to raise money for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which funds research and provides advocacy and support for people living with spinal cord injuries, ABC News reported.
Their campaign brought in more than $24,000, according to the foundation’s website.