The numbness started in her feet. Elizabeth Pehota didn’t think much of it. She had just run in her first Boston Marathon, a goal she had set for herself when she was a student at Boston College and watched the marathoners run by the campus at Mile 21 on Patriots Day.
She was training for the Berlin Marathon in Germany that fall of 2022. The numbness started to spread, up her legs. To her thighs. Her hands. She was dragging her feet and stumbling.
Pehota, who grew up in Fairfield and lives in Boston, was 29 years old, a former cheerleader for Boston College and the Boston Celtics. She was in peak shape. Something was clearly wrong.
A few weeks before Berlin, she tested positive for Lyme disease. There was a sigh of relief between her and her boyfriend Matt Keemon, who was going to run with her. But the doctor wanted her to go to a neurologist to get checked out further, because she had Lyme before.
On Sept. 21, 2022, five days before Berlin, she got a call from the neurologist.
“I never thought I’d hear these words in my life – ‘We believe you have multiple sclerosis and there’s no cure,’” she said last week. “That was a shock to me.
“Someone in their late 20s, getting a diagnosis you’re going to have for the rest of your life is really scary. I didn’t know what MS was.”
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease that causes breakdown of the protective covering of the nerves, leading to a host of symptoms, including numbness, weakness, memory issues and trouble walking, among others.
The doctor said she could still go to Berlin if she wanted. So she did. She said it was the hardest marathon she’d ever run; she still finished in under four hours.
Three years later, Pehota, 32, is still running, now faster than ever. She is training for her 15th marathon, the Chicago Marathon, on Oct. 12. She has run all seven of the Abbott World Marathon Majors – she completed that goal in Sydney, Australia last month – and now she has set her sights on running her way into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Pehota wants to break the record for the fastest woman with MS to run a marathon. The record – 3 hours, 53 minutes, 2 seconds – was set in April by Juliane Keane at the London Marathon.
Pehota is confident she can break the record; she ran a personal best of 3:19 at the Tokyo Marathon earlier in the year, but she didn’t register the time with Guinness because she wanted to raise awareness about MS with her Chicago race.
“I’ve learned a lot about running and how to listen to my body throughout all this,” Pehota said. “I’ve learned to control my form a lot better, so my feet don’t drag, I’ve learned the right types of shoes to wear.
“MS has a lot of limitations, and my major symptoms are the numbness and tingling. I’ve seen some regression in the numbness; most of it is in my feet and my hands. I do believe if your MS is caught and you’re treated within the first six months of your first symptom, you can see a little bit of regression.
“But it still sucks, I haven’t felt my feet planted firmly on the ground in three years.”
Matt Keemon holds up Elizabeth Pehota during a Boston Celtics game in 2017 when both of them were cheerleaders for the Celtics. (Photo courtesy: Elizabeth Pehota)
Finding her base
Pehota grew up in Fairfield and went to Fairfield Warde High School, where she played lacrosse, ran cross country for one year and was a cheerleader for the high school team as well as Xtreme Cheer CT, an All-Star cheerleading team. She went on to cheer at Boston College, where she met Keemon, who was also a cheerleader.
Pehota was the flyer, the one on top of the pyramid, the one the cheerleading guys threw up in the air, the one that balanced on Keemon’s hand.
“It’s a sport that inherently requires a ton of trust, especially in her position,” Keemon said. “I was her base for a good portion of that time. It started as a friendship. It developed over time into something a lot more.”
Keemon is still her base. They were married last August in Newport, R.I., a fairytale wedding on a perfect day.
“Many of our adventures start with her tapping me on the shoulder in the middle of a workday and starting the conversation with, ‘This might sound crazy but …’” he said, laughing. “She’s the dreamer, I’m the logistics.
“I’ve taken the role of being a grounding force, a good foundation, a good base so when she wants to take these big swings, we can.”
Elizabeth Pehota working as a reporter for the New England Revolution. (Photo credit: David Silverman)
Pehota was working as a team reporter for the New England Revolution when she decided to run Boston for the first time. She raised $10,000 for charity and was set to make her debut in 2020. But the pandemic canceled everything, and she had to run her first marathon, virtually, in Rhode Island that fall.
She went to Chicago the next year with the idea of running a Boston qualifying time, but it was a hot day, and she didn’t make it. A few weeks later, she ran the Charles River Marathon in Boston in 3:29:15 and qualified for the 2022 Boston Marathon and the next April, she finally got to run by Boston College herself at Mile 21.
“That race was incredible,” Pehota said. “It was the pinnacle of 2 ½ years of hard work and dedication and believing in yourself. That was one of the happiest days of my life.”
She threw herself into her training for Berlin and that’s when the symptoms of MS started to crop up.
The trip to Berlin was a blur. She was on a high dose of prednisone, couldn’t sleep and was worried. So was Keemon, who was there to run the race with her.
Elizabeth Pehota and her then-boyfriend (now husband) Matt Keemon running at the 2022 Berlin Marathon in Germany. (Photo credit: Berlin Marathon)
“I was a mess,” Pehota said. “I was trying to figure out what having MS meant. It would hit me in different waves. I ran that race; it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. My feet felt like bricks. I was dragging them on the ground every step. I was very lucky to have Matt with me. I knew I wanted to run the race. I didn’t want the diagnosis stop me from doing something I wanted to do.
“When I crossed that finish line, I was so proud of myself. It gave me the reassurance that MS wasn’t going to define me. I could continue to achieve my dreams. They might look a little different than they had in the past. I could still move forward and be the person at my core that I am.”
Pehota eventually left her job with the Revolution and became an advocate for people with MS. She has chronicled her progress on one of her Instagram accounts, healthy_cheers.
“I wanted to make some noise, fundraising through the MS society and raise awareness,” she said. “People don’t talk about having multiple sclerosis or any invisible diseases or chronic illnesses enough. People look at you and think you’re healthy. You have no idea what somebody else could be going through in their life.
“One of my main messages is to treat people with kindness because you never know what they’re going through behind closed doors.”
This will be her first time back to Chicago since 2021 before her diagnosis. Since then, she’s learned a lot about herself, both mentally and physically. She has also refined her running form.
“I’ve learned to give myself grace,” she said. “I’ve learned to listen to my body.
“A lot of runners can kind of zone out; I need to make sure I check in with my body – ‘Can I hear my feet? Are they dragging?’ I’ve been teaching myself over months to lift my feet a little more.
“I’ve worked a lot on speedwork to get faster. If you told me in 2022, I’d be faster, I would have never believed you. I would have never believed I was running all these marathons and continuing to do it.”
To learn more about Pehota or donate to her MS fundraiser, go to https://events.nationalmssociety.org/participants/Elizabeth-Pehota/donate.
