Miracle Runner to Return to Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach Half Marathon

Competitor Group Inc.'s (parent company of the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Series) senior vice president, John Smith (left), visited Greg Kenney Jr. during Greg's recovery to check on his progress.

Some time about 10 a.m. on Sept. 5, Greg Kenney, an experienced long-distance runner, will walk down the finishing chute at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach Half Marathon. Waiting for the 55-year-old former Air Force chief master sergeant and seated in a wheelchair will be his 18-year-old son, also named Greg.

Greg Sr. will push his son the final stretch past the finish line. There will be tears and there will be cheers. “It’s almost like we’re going to finish what we started,” Greg Sr. says.

Father and son started the Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach Half Marathon last year. Father finished, son did not. Were it not for Adrianna Amarillo, a 29-year-old Navy doctor who stopped when she heard screaming cries for help at about mile 12 of last year’s race, Greg Jr. might not be alive today.

“Greg has three guardian angels,” Greg Sr. says. “There’s his mother, his godmother and Adrianna.”

Last year, Greg Jr. collapsed near mile 12, lapsed into cardiac arrest, went minutes without breathing and suffered brain damage. Weeks later, a doctor told Greg’s parents that their only child would live the rest of his life in a vegetative state.

Instead, he has made a remarkable recovery. With the use of braces and a walker, Greg Jr. can walk 20-yard laps at home, which takes him about 10 minutes. His speech is slow, halting and warbled. But he can talk, and from his wheelchair, spoke a few words when his high school class graduated in late May.

“He has come light years,” Greg Sr. says.

“A physical therapist said they’ve never seen someone with so much brain damage come back so far, so quickly,” Greg’s mother, Stephanie adds.

At the time of last year’s race, Greg Jr. was 17 years old, two weeks into his senior year at Grace Brethren Christian School, a private school where his senior class numbered about 40.

With a 4.10 grade-point average, Greg was a valedictorian candidate. He was class president. He was a singer and dancer, performing in more than 60 plays—most in community theater but some on the road, far from his home in Accokeek, Md., about 60 miles southeast of Baltimore.

Like his parents, Greg is devout in his Christian faith. He spent two spring breaks serving missions in Haiti and Belize. He stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall, weighed a lean 165 pounds and had begun hardening his body, pushing through intense T25 workout videos.

When Greg was in the seventh or eighth grade, he traveled with his father to Dayton, Ohio, where Greg Sr. ran the Air Force Half Marathon.

“I want to do something like that one day,” Greg told his father.

Last year’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach Half Marathon was supposed to be that day. Greg Jr., who had never run a road race, trained hard. For more than a year, he jogged three days a week. He knocked off a 14-miler on a treadmill eight days before the race.

Greg Sr. expected his son to finish an hour before him last year. At mile 9, he texted his son. No response.

“I didn’t figure it was anything strange,” Greg Sr. recalls. “I thought he was taking his time.”

Meanwhile, further up the course, Amarillo trudged along. Her half marathon personal record is 1 hour, 51 minutes. But she knew she wouldn’t PR at Virginia Beach. She had stayed out late the night before, celebrating her birthday with her sister, her head not hitting the pillow until 2 a.m. She considered no-showing, but had changed her mind.

Just past mile 12, Amarillo heard a scream from behind her.

“Medical! Medical!”

“I turned around and saw a woman bent over a collapsed person,” Amarillo says. “I had to go because I’m an ER doc. It would be wrong for me not to.”

Greg Jr. had fallen to the ground.

“He was totally green,” Amarillo says. “His eyes were rolling in the back of his head, he was gasping for breath.”

She felt for a pulse but couldn’t locate one. She pounded on his chest for what seemed like two minutes but still got no pulse.

“It was the most harrowing time of my life,” she says.

Within a couple minutes, paramedics arrived and took over caring for Greg. Shaken, Amarillo began crying. Minutes later, a paramedic told her that Greg’s pulse had kicked in.

“I started crying even more,” she says.

Amarillo is a lieutenant in the Navy. As part of her medical residency, she worked as an emergency room doctor at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Va. She reported to work that night and, ironically, that was where Greg Jr. had been flown by helicopter. She oversaw his care that first night.

Backtrack a month earlier, Amarillo was in Key West, Fla., where her fiancé, who is also in the Navy, was stationed. They were at a bike rack when Amarillo noticed something shiny on the ground. She thought it was a quarter, but when she picked it up she noticed that it was a silver medallion with an angel stamped onto it.

Amarillo recalls, “I wondered, ‘What does that mean to me? Is someone looking out for me?’”

Days after Greg Jr. was hospitalized and resting in a coma, Amarillo gave him the medallion. Greg’s mother had a jeweler mount the medallion on a silver plate and strung to a silver chain.  Greg Jr. has been wearing it now for nearly a year.

“I’m convinced Adrianna saved my son’s life,” says Greg Sr.

The past year has been a difficult one for the Kenneys. Greg Jr. was in a coma for nearly three weeks. There was the prognosis that he’d be a vegetable for the rest of his life. There were the hundreds of hours of physical therapy.

He didn’t return home until June 3, almost nine months after collapsing near mile 12.

But so, too, have there been blessings. While Greg didn’t return to school, he attended his class’ graduation and wrote a speech that was read at the graduation. With Greg sitting in his wheelchair in the front of a church, his third-grade teacher read the speech.

When the teacher was finished, a microphone was handed to Greg Jr. “I can’t wait to see the amazing things you do,” he told his fellow students. Then he stood up. Amidst tears, the people in attendance burst into applause.

Greg’s GoFundMe account has raised more than $20,000. Stage construction members of The Port Tobacco Theater Club, Greg’s home theater, surprised the family by building a government-approved wheelchair ramp in the family’s garage.

“To have that stress release gone, are you kidding me?” Greg Sr. says, relieved.

Nearly a year after Greg’s accident, no one knows why his heart gave out that morning along the Virginia Beach boardwalk. CT scans and X-rays show no damage to his heart. Stephanie, meanwhile, relies on scripture for guidance and motivation, often citing Proverbs 19:21:

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”

“Although our life is much changed and very different, we know that Greg has a special purpose,” Stephanie says. “His story is still being written. We don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be amazing.”

Come race day on Sept. 5, before Greg Sr. walks the half marathon, Stephanie and other family members will wheel her son through the 5K.

Amarillo, the woman who likely saved Greg’s life, will run the half marathon again. “I have such great hopes for Greg,” she says.

Greg was scheduled to return to high school in late August. He doesn’t like it when the word “handicapped” is used to describe his condition.

“Why do they call it that?” he has told his father. “It’s really a temporary limitation.”

Greg Sr. is confident his son will recover, one day walking the stage again, acting and singing.

“There is zero doubt he’s going to recover,” the father says. “He loves the Lord, and he knows what he wants to do. It could be tomorrow, it could be a year from now, it could be two years. But he will recover.”

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