Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
With darkness still hovering over the 13.1-mile course in Houston, Serena Ramsey Burla took the line. In the weeks leading up to the 2010 USA Half Marathon Championships, the 5-foot-1-inch runner had hobbled around her house, barely able to put weight on her right leg because of excruciating pain in her hamstring.
“I wanted to carry her,” recalls Jillian Peterson, a former college teammate. “I talked with her the day before, and she said, ‘Jill, I don’t know that I can start the race.’”
Yet despite the anguish, Burla insisted she was fine. The pain subsided when she ran, she’d told Peterson.
The gun fired. As Burla hit her stride, her leg began to feel better. For nearly 8 miles, she held tightly to the right hip of race leader Shalane Flanagan, clocking each mile in approximately 5 minutes, 20 seconds. Eventually, Flanagan pulled away, and Burla finished second with a personal best time of 1:10:08 that qualified her for the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.
Six weeks later, Burla lay unconscious on an operating table in New York City while a cancer surgeon removed part of her right hamstring.
Following the race, Burla’s coach—who’s also a physician—had suggested that she see a sports-medicine specialist in New York. Noticing a strange pocket in Burla’s leg on the ultrasound image, Dr. Daniel Hamner sent her to get an MRI the next day. “The red flag was when I was getting through with the MRI, they handed me my images and sent me immediately back to Dr. Hamner,” says Burla. She recalls wondering what was happening as she sat alone in the taxi on the way to the doctor’s office. There, she discovered it was a malignant tumor.
“It was a real whirlwind…to think that a little bit of time off or some ice is going to be the solution, to ‘Oh my goodness, this is potentially life-threatening.’”
The official diagnosis confirmed it was synovial sarcoma. Burla was among approximately 10,500 Americans diagnosed that year with the disease, which can metastasize and spread to the lymph nodes or even the lungs. Just decades ago, amputation was the primary form of treating a sarcoma in a limb. Now, sarcomas are usually treated with a combination of surgery and radiation.
The first goal was to save her life. The second: to save her leg.
Her coach told her, “Don’t you dare go home and Google this.” He knew it would only create anxiety. Her job was to focus on the immediate next step—not easy for someone who’d spent her entire life looking far ahead.
The daughter of a high-school coach in her native Wisconsin, Burla had attended the University of Missouri in Columbia. In both track and cross-country, she was a hard worker, a self-proclaimed perfectionist. By her senior year, the four-time Academic All-American finished in sixth place in the 10,000-meter run at the 2006 NCAA Outdoor Championships.
“She is tough,” says MU coach Rebecca Wilmes. “She was just one of those kids who doesn’t blink—at anything.”
After graduation, Burla moved to St. Louis and continued to put in 60-mile weeks. In November 2006, Team Riadha coach Isaya Okwiya asked whether she wanted to join the team. Two years later, she ran in her first U.S. Olympic Team Trials, in the 10,000 meters. By that time, she was married to Adam Burla, a former shot-putter at MU, and 12 weeks pregnant with her son, Boyd.
When she was diagnosed with cancer last year, Burla immediately thought of her then–1-year-old son. “I had gone through worrying about Boyd and thinking, ‘I’m going to face this because I have to be here for him,’” she recalls. But eventually she came to terms with the situation. “I had this peace come about me that if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.”
On February 26, 2010, Dr. Patrick J. Boland, an oncological orthopedic surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, removed the sarcoma and a portion of Burla’s hamstring. Afterward, he told her, “It was hard to cut the muscle out, because it was pretty muscle.”
In the months that followed, Burla’s recovery proceeded remarkably well. Tests this March revealed she would not have to undergo radiation or chemotherapy. “The greatest fear was that no one knew—and no one still really knows—what’s really left in there,” she says.
Progressing cautiously, she worked to strengthen the muscles around the portion of hamstring that was removed.
By April, she was running again. By July, she was competing.
Just eight months after the surgery, Burla was back in New York City, this time lining up to cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for the first mile of the 2010 New York City Marathon. Running her first marathon there was a benediction of sorts. “It kind of brought it full circle,” she says. “I had spent so much time not running there.”
The course went past Memorial Sloan-Kettering. “I had two choices,” she recalls. “I’m either going to completely break down and lose it…or I’m going to be restrengthened.” As she passed the medical center, she waved at the patient and staff spectators. Through tear-filled eyes, she pointed at the 6 ½–inch scar that runs down the outside of her right leg.
She finished the marathon in 2:37:06, the fourth American woman in the field.
Today, Burla’s personal bests and career highlights don’t show any breaks, no big gaps to indicate time off surrounding the birth of her son or her cancer diagnosis and the accompanying radical surgery. She has beaten Olympians and four-time Boston Marathon champions. On the line and over the course, she’s a pit bull.
“She’s like a metronome,” says Wilmes. “She gets in a rhythm and rolls.” The description Burla paints of long Sunday runs, logging double-digit miles and multiple hours, is nothing short of serene. She likes getting lost in the process, the tired but fulfilled feeling she has once she unlaces her shoes.
Since running the New York City Marathon last November, Burla has repeated her second-place performance at the 2011 USA Half Marathon Championships. She also recently moved from St. Louis to D.C., where she’s training closely with Team Riadha for January’s U.S. Olympic Team Trials marathon in Houston.
“The thing about Serena, she’s not some freak of nature—physiologically, she’s not perfect or anything,” says Riadha teammate Shauneen Garrahan. Burla’s short, choppy stride is a churning motor next to the gazelles who gobble asphalt. “What makes her stand out is just her ability to train hard and push through the pain… She understands there are no secrets, no shortcuts.”
“That’s the real beauty of Serena,” says Wilmes. “She’s not going to live without taking the risk. Because to not risk is just not acceptable.”
