HS Cross-Country Runner Crawls to Finish Line After Breaking Leg on Course
An "admirable effort" doesn't begin to encapsulate Connor Callihan's final cross-country race of the 2014 season.
A junior at T.C. Roberson High School in Asheville, North Carolina, Callihan crawled across the finish line after suffering multiple bone fractures in the final feet of the race.
The Asheville Citizen-Times' Bob Berghaus brings us the story of Callihan's heroic finish, which occurred Monday during a Mountain Athletic Conference race at Fletcher Community Park.
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Onlookers watched as Callihan crumpled to the ground mere paces away from the finish line. Many assumed he had collapsed out of exhaustion, and members of the crowd encouraged him to finish.
And finish he did.
Clawing forward on his stomach, Callihan crawled the final feet to the line. Roberson cross-country coach Andrew Devine marveled at the junior's determination.
"I've been doing this for a long time," Devine said. "I've never seen anything like this. ... His leg was in a way nature didn't intend it to be. This went from an admirable effort to something totally different."
Callihan was carted from the field on a gurney and taken to a hospital, where an X-ray revealed that he had broken his tibia (shin bone) in three places. He later said nothing was going to keep him from finishing the race.
"This was my last race of the year," Callihan told Berghaus from a hospital bed Tuesday. "I just had to finish for my team. I just had to."
As for the cause of Callihan's injury, the culprit appears to be an untreated stress fracture. He mentioned several times leading up to the race that his leg felt sore but believed it was routine irritation from practice.
Berghaus reports that Callihan underwent surgery at Mission Hospital on Tuesday, with doctors inserting rods into the fractured bone.
Before going into surgery, however, Callihan took a phone call from former U.S. track star Manteo Mitchell.
A silver medalist at the 2012 Olympic Games, Mitchell fought through a broken fibula while running the 1,600-meter relay, helping the U.S. to take second in the event.
Mitchell told Berghaus that he had heard about Callihan's crawl and wanted to reach out as a fellow athlete who struggled to the finish line through unimaginable pain.
"I wanted to reach out to Connor because I know what he's going through and what he's about to encounter after the fact," Mitchell said. "The goal of my conversation with him was to ease his mind a bit going into surgery. ... He's a good kid."
As someone who couldn't finish a flag football game due to a strained back, I doff my cap to you, Connor Callihan. You're a tough—and perhaps a bit crazy—soul.
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