Leap Day, February 29, 2020. Sara and Ryan Hall are in the back seat of an Uber, sitting in traffic—and silence—in downtown Atlanta. Shivering a little in her race kit, Sara accepts Ryan’s offer of his sweatshirt. The driver mutters something about road closures. It would’ve been faster to get out and hobble back to the hotel, but they just sit there. Staring out the window, in disbelief. “We were in total shock,” recalls Sara. “We just didn’t see this coming.”
Sara arrived at last year’s Olympic Marathon Trials as the second-fastest woman at the starting line favored to make the U.S. team for Tokyo. Confidence was high. The night before the race, Sara and Ryan told their four daughters, biological sisters adopted at ages 5 to 15 from an orphanage in Ethiopia in 2015: All of mom’s hard work will be worth it for this moment. Ryan, Sara’s husband of 15 years and coach for the last five, even teared up. “I remember…,” Sara says. “He’d said, ‘Tomorrow is going to be your day.’”
Except, it turned out, it wasn’t. Atlanta’s tough course “obliterated” her legs, as Sara posted on Instagram. She dropped out at mile 22. DNF. Her dream—their dream—dashed.
Sara had made it to the Olympic Trials five times before. But this time was different: “I’d never felt this prepared,” she says from her home in the hills of Flagstaff, Arizona. “It was the biggest heartbreak of my career.”
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