When LaGrange resident Linda Poggensee, a lifelong runner, retired four years ago, she took it as an opportunity to take her hobby a step further by signing up for the Berlin Marathon.
“I’ve always run and enjoyed running because it’s nice to be outside and let your mind shut off for a while,” she said. “When I knew I was going to be giving notice and planning on retiring, I thought, ‘[Running a marathon] might be a fun thing to do,’ something to work on and keep you busy in retirement.”
After completing the Berlin Marathon — and enjoying Oktoberfest with her husband, Bob Poggensee — she went on to complete the New York City Marathon as well.
But with just three miles left in the Chicago Marathon last October, disaster struck.
“Basically, I broke my leg at mile 23. I went down, and I was feeling a little tired and in pain at that point because, you know, it’s mile 23,” Poggensee told the Landmark. “When I tried to get up, I was like, ‘Oh, this is weird. I can’t really stand. I can’t feel my foot.’ I thought I had dislocated my hip.”
Poggensee skipped the marathon medical tent and was taken straight to the hospital.
“They discovered that it had actually broken, like cracked all the way across the bone up near the top of my thigh, so I got emergency surgery,” she said, which resulted in doctors installing a titanium rod in her leg.
While many might take the injury as a sign to slow their pace and take time to recover, Poggensee instead took it as a challenge.
“The thing is, I had just gotten into the Tokyo Marathon only a few weeks ago, and I was like, ‘This is really tough to get into.’ I got in through the lottery,” she said. “I was like, ‘Is this at all possible?’ They looked at me like, ‘Look, you just broke your leg,’ but they wouldn’t tell me no.”
She spent the next four and a half months going through intensive physical therapy and rehabilitation, though injuries like hers usually take six months on average to heal, she said.
“I was really determined to try to make this goal. That date wasn’t moving, and I reached out to the Tokyo Marathon and said, ‘Hey, I broke my leg. I’m willing to give you whatever you need, x-rays or doctor notes,’ but they didn’t care. The only way you can defer from Tokyo is to be pregnant,” she said. “They would’ve given away my spot.”
Poggensee said she worked with Perform Physical Therapy, which has locations in Countryside and Burr Ridge, to recover from her injury. With the owner of the practice and her therapist being marathon runners themselves, she said they understood her goal and knew how to get her there on time.
One thing that sets Tokyo apart from other marathons, she said, is the way it staggers its cutoff points, which her therapist worked into her recovery.
“A lot of races will have a general cutoff point, because eventually they need to open up the streets for everybody, but Tokyo has multiple cutoff points” every five kilometers or so, she said. “There’s this bus that goes along, and if you’re not ahead of this bus — they call it the sweeper — they pull you off the course, and you are considered not finishing. I knew that I had to stay in front of this thing at all these cutoff points, and that was something I was working on with the PT.”
Then, on March 1, the day came for Poggensee to put the peddle to the metal. In spite of the feeling that her injured leg was still weaker than her other leg, Poggensee managed to stay ahead of the sweeper and finish the Tokyo Marathon.
“Right around the time that I got past the final cutoff point before the finish, and I knew I was going to be able to finish, I felt like crying,” she said. “It was like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I did this.’”
With Tokyo in the rearview mirror, Poggensee plans to take some time off from running to fully recover before setting her sights on the London and Boston marathons in hopes of earning an Abbott World Marathon Majors Six Star Medal.