Shaunta-Maé Alexander had a long journey to the start line of Sunday’s United Airlines NYC Half, not just because she’s from Sacramento, Calif.
The 35-year-old children’s book author and aspiring actress has overcome a lifetime of illnesses — even paralysis — to run her first half marathon. More than 27,000 athletes are expected to take the 13.1-mile tour of Brooklyn and Manhattan hosted by New York Road Runners.
Alexander is part of the organization’s Athletes with Disabilities program, and she will be guided in the race by Tunde Oyeneyin. The Brooklyn-based Peloton instructor inspired Alexander to learn to walk again and helped hone her athletic abilities.
“I was part of the Peloton community, and I saw all of these people in the community running races and doing all of these things,” Alexander told The Post.
“I told God,” she continued, “if he could restore my walking, my movement, then I would walk like I’ve never walked before. I would run like I’ve never run before, and I would dance like I’ve never danced before.”
Alexander, who grew up in foster care, said her first major health issue emerged when she was 9 years old.
She started having stomach pains and trouble keeping food down. The problems got worse — and she was hospitalized at 12 while attempting to go out to eat.
“I could not get out of the car because the pain was excruciating,” Alexander recalled. “I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t catch my breath.”
Finally, when she was in high school, Alexander was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic condition that irritates and causes swelling in the digestive tract.
The inflammation and ulcerations can spur nasty side effects like diarrhea, stomach pain, cramps and bloody stools.
“I was the kid that had to have two bags, not just a backpack, but an extra bag with extra underwear, with diapers, with medicine, all these types of things, because I could not control my bowels and because at any point I could be in excruciating pain,” Alexander said.
“I couldn’t participate in activities like everybody else did because of the Crohn’s disease, which really had a major effect on my mental health at the time.”
The other conditions “just kind of kept piling on, one after the other” — POTS is a fast heartbeat when standing up from a sitting or lying position and chronic pericarditis is when the sac surrounding the heart becomes inflamed.
Then, in 2019, when she was around 30, Alexander found herself back in the hospital with a severe Crohn’s flare-up from food poisoning. She suspects she got it from a fruit smoothie.
She underwent a colonoscopy so doctors could evaluate the extent of the damage to her bowels — a rare reaction to anesthesia used in the procedure left her paralyzed.
“I couldn’t move my arms, I couldn’t move my legs. I couldn’t speak,” Alexander described. “I had cognitive issues. I had memory issues. I couldn’t tell you simple things like math. If you were to ask me what five plus two is, I wasn’t able to tell you.”
When she was discharged from the hospital about a month later, she could walk with a walker. Physical therapy helped some, but she still struggled to move her legs without assistance.
She suffered a major setback in 2021, becoming paralyzed from the waist down.
“I had gotten really depressed, had no real quality of life, had given up because I’d been sick my entire life, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Alexander said.
In January 2022, she decided to make a change. Motivated by “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo’s love of Peloton, she started taking Oyeneyin’s arms and light weights classes from her wheelchair with 3-pound weights.
Weeks later, she bought a Peloton bike and peddled it with her hands for hours a day. That April, she could peddle slowly with her legs, and she took her first live ride with Oyeneyin in June.
In November, her family helped her buy a Peloton Tread as she tried to walk on her own.
“We don’t hear a lot about how patients and individuals who go from paralysis or any type of injury where they’re bedridden and not using muscles … go back to reactivating those muscles and reactivating those joints and how incredibly painful it is, but it very much was,” she said.
Alexander focused on her gait and strength training — eventually walking on the treadmill turned to jogging and running.
She finished her first 5K in June 2023 and several races since then.
Now, she’s ready for her first half marathon. Alexander is fundraising for NYRR Team for Kids to support children who “were just like me. The underdogs. The othered. The ones who didn’t fit in.”
She’s come a long way — and she has to go a little farther, with Oyeneyin by her side.
“Shaunta-Maé is an unstoppable force. She’s an inspiration, and the fact that I’ve been able to play a role in how far she has come is such a huge honor,” Oyeneyin told The Post. “I can’t wait to cheer her on through every step to that finish line.”
