Run, Jacky, Run

Jacky Hunt-Broersma has woken up every morning since mid-January with one goal: to run a full marathon that day.

That's not a typo. The extreme runner is well on her way to claiming the world record title for most consecutive marathons, hoping to complete 102 of them in 102 days.🤯 That's ~2,600 miles – or in other words, comparable to running across the entire country.

😳 And if all that wasn't impressive enough... She's doing it all with one leg, having lost her left leg below the knee to cancer in 2001.

📖 Up and at 'em: Jacky was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma in 2001, a rare cancer that affects soft tissue surrounding bones or the bones themselves. She made the difficult decision to amputate her left leg soon afterward. 

For the following fifteen years, she was fairly sedentary until picking up running in 2016. It started as a simple hobby to share with her husband but soon became one of her life's biggest passions. 

🤖🦿😉 We knew she was a robot... To make running possible, Jacky invested in a prosthetic she calls her "blade." The device cost a pretty penny, with a typical attachment going for around $10,000, which insurance doesn't cover. 

• "It isn’t like throwing away a pair of running shoes you don't like. With a blade you invest a lot of money so you can’t just decide that you are not running anymore,” Jacky wrote on her blog. 
• “Luckily from the first time I tried on my blade and took a few runs, I fell in love with running and I truly felt like I was flying.”

For the last six years, Jacky has run everything from family 5Ks to ultra marathons, putting thousands of miles on her blade. 

She decided earlier this year to go for her current goal of 102 marathons in 102 days.

💥 The impact: “I hoped it would inspire a lot of people to get out of their comfort zone and push a little bit farther,” Jacky said of her ambitious goal. “You’re stronger than you think — and you’re capable of so much more.”

• She's garnered quite the fanbase in her journey to marathon 102, and the cancer survivor has been able to raise more than $16,000 for Amputee Blade Runners, an organization that helps amputee runners get prosthetic blades.

🏃‍♀️💨 Anotha one... Jacky ran the Boston Marathon yesterday, successfully completing number 92 out of 102. Today she's running number 93, with less than ten days left to go.

Run, Jacky, run.👏