Latest news with #AustinMarathon
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
The law didn't recognize my sexual assault. Texas lawmakers must fix that
Two years ago, I set off on a journey that would change my life. A journey to heal. To reclaim my story. To take back the night that shattered everything for me as a sophomore at the University of Texas, when I was sexually assaulted. I didn't know then what this path would look like. I just knew I had to do something. I ended up running 29 marathons across this country. At finish lines, on playgrounds, in quiet moments between interviews — I met survivors. Story after story felt far too similar to mine. The weight of those stories pressed down on me until silence was no longer an option. I didn't know what to do with that weight at first. So I turned it into something visible. I ran a marathon carrying a mattress — because that's what survivors are forced to carry every single day, the weight of what was done to us, and a world that too often refuses to believe us. Then I found out the worst night of my life didn't even count as a sexual assault in the eyes of Texas law. I was assaulted 10 years ago when I went to a fraternity party with a group of my sorority sisters. I was handed a drink that I believe was laced with something, because I have little memory of that night. But I remember the bed. And I remember saying "no" over and over again. I was clearly targeted. Taken advantage of. Humiliated. One person handed me a drink, and another person took what wasn't his. I can't remember the worst part of that night, but I do remember this: He laughed. He laughed while explaining what he did. I've had to ask a question no Texan should ever have to ask: Would it have been better if I was raped in a different state — like Florida or Oklahoma — where at least they would tell me that what happened to me counts? I can't begin to describe what survivors go through after we survive. I don't have words strong enough to express what it feels like to know that, for many of us, our own state offers loopholes to our rapists while closing the doors of justice to us. Texas' law fails to properly address sexual assaults that happen when a person is unable to consent because of intoxication or impairment from a substance. The law also fails to recognize it's an assault when sexual activity happens after a person has withdrawn their consent. House Bill 3073, which passed the House 129-4, would clarify the legal definition of sexual assault in both of those areas. But we're still waiting for the Senate to move forward on this bill to make it clear that no one deserves to be violated, and no one deserves to be disbelieved. This is not a radical request. Gov. Greg Abbott's Sexual Assault Survivors' Task Force recommended these clarifications to the law. Our representatives overwhelmingly support it. Members of the Texas Senate, don't let silence be your answer. In February, as I crawled the Austin Marathon for 22 hours, it was the worst pain I've ever known. My knees were shredded. My hands were bruised and bleeding. But I kept crawling because that's what survivors are forced to do. We crawl through pain. Through shame. Through silence. I still had 13 miles to go to complete the marathon distance. But I made a decision in that moment: I didn't have to stay down anymore. I could stand. I could walk. I could run. I could fight. And that's what I'm doing now. I'm fighting for every survivor who was silenced, every survivor who wasn't believed, every survivor still carrying the weight. So Sen. Pete Flores and members of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee: Please don't let Texas be a state where survivors are forced to crawl. Help us stand. Vote HB 3073 out of committee now, before it's too late. Summer Willis is a Texas-born survivor and founder of Strength Through Strides, a nonprofit that empowers survivors and advocates for policy reforms around sexual assault. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Senate running out of time to close sexual assault loopholes | Opinion
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
From emergency nurse to patient: 24-year-old lives through stroke
AUSTIN (KXAN) – When it came to picking a career, Alex Wilson-Garza felt a calling to serve others – she comes from a family of teachers and first responders, including police officers. 'I felt like nursing was always the right pick for me,' said the registered nurse. Two years ago, she didn't imagine the roles would reverse and that she would be on the hospital bed where she works — the emergency room at St. David's Round Rock Medical Center. Go Red For Women Luncheon Hosted By The American Heart Association 'It was a normal day, I was with my husband,' Garza said. 'We were on the couch getting ready to go to one of our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes, when I wasn't starting to feel too well and from there is when I don't actually remember what happened.' Garza said her husband told her that the left side of her face looked droopy, and it was difficult for her to pick up things with her left hand. Garza said the only thing she remembers is feeling dizzy. 'When I finally kind of came to it, I just remember staying on the edge of my couch, and my husband is putting my shoes on, saying that we need to go to the emergency room,' Garza recalled about that day. 'I was like, no, we're not going, I'm fine. Thank God he was persistent.' Familiar faces greeted her at the ER – nurses and doctors she works with on a daily basis. Trouble sleeping? Austin sleep apnea trial could help transform lives and treatment options 'I was surrounded by coworkers, people I trust, fantastic nurses, fantastic doctors, and also, especially my family, and my husband who saved my life,' Garza said. She said she went through testing, scans, and blood work. 'I've done it a million times to other patients, and now it was my turn,' the registered nurse said. The results showed Garza suffered from a stroke caused by a clot in her brain. 'Whenever you're suspecting a stroke, time is of the essence,' Garza said. One of her colleagues, Dr. Trent Roubleau, a neurologist at the emergency room, treated her. He said the longer people take to address a stroke – the likelihood things can get worse. Inspired to run after the Austin Marathon? Former UT track athlete, Olympic trial qualifier shares 4 easy tips 'Approximately one million brain cells die per minute in an acute stroke. That's irreversible. We don't generate new brain cells,' Roubleau said. 'The longer the stroke is allowed to happen, the more the brain will die, and the more likelihood exists that the symptoms the person is having will be irreversible.' The American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association use the abbreviation FAST to describe the symptoms. When you notice Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, it is Time to call 911. Both the AHA and ASA said stroke is the nation's fifth leading cause of death. Garza was surprised she suffered a stroke because she lives an active lifestyle and eats well. 'My husband, son, and I are always outside, walking the dogs, we go to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu together, swim and all that good stuff,' Garza said. Finding community through sweat and friendship: The story of SweatPals 'It's very rare for a blood clot to develop with no risk factors,' the neurologist said. 'Generally, there is a modifiable risk factor, whether it is genetic, or the blood being a little bit too prone to form blood clots.' There are other factors Roubleau said can increase the risk including hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives. 'Among women, it's a significant risk factor that people don't generally think can cause blood clots to develop, but this is actually a risk factor for stroke,' he said. The AHA and ASA recently came out with new guidelines to help people reduce the risk of having a first stroke. The guidelines urge health care professionals to screen patients for sedentary behavior, a confirmed risk factor for stroke, according to both associations. The guidelines also want doctors to encourage their patients to exercise. And while medications, lifestyle changes and nutrition help – the AHA and ASA recommend a Mediterranean diet because it has been shown to reduce the risk of stroke. The guidelines also recommend health care professionals screen people for high blood pressure, cholesterol, high blood sugar and obesity. Both associations are also calling for public awareness about the benefits of quitting smoking, increasing exercise, eating better, and focusing on sleep – lifestyle changes that can help reduce the risk. Austin athlete to watch: Swimmer Lizzi Smith hopes to bring spotlight to Paralympics Garza's treatment at the emergency room included a tissue plasminogen activator, a drug that dissolves blood clots and restores blood flow to the brain. She also underwent a thrombectomy. 'I was taken to the operating room where they went in, and took a little bit what was left of the clot out of my brain,' Garza said. After spending two days in ICU, recovery turned out to be a challenge. Garza is used to working out every day, playing sports and it was hard for her to slow down. 'At the time I could barely walk a mile because I was dizzy,' she said. 'It took about a good three to four months to get back to the level of fitness I was in. Luckily, I was able to get back to work three to four weeks after the stroke.' Talking about her experience is getting easier – Garza calls it therapeutic. Pregnant Texas mom beats Stage 3 breast cancer, shares story to support life-saving research 'When it first happened, it was really hard for me to talk about because I was very angry, not at myself, I was angry at the world, because, why did this happen to me?' Garza urges people to listen to their body and to ask whether what their body is feeling is normal. 'I hope one person out there listens and gets checked out.' Garza said she is not letting the stroke define her and stop her from living her life. Here's what she said when KXAN asked if this moment in life empowered her. 'Yes, 100 percent! This experience has made me a better nurse,' Garza said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
When do Austin Marathon road closures start? Here's how to avoid traffic this weekend.
This Sunday, Austin will be buzzing with energy as thousands of runners take to the streets for the Ascension Seton Austin Marathon, Half Marathon, and 5K. Amid the excitement, significant road closures will be in place. The races kick off at 6:55 AM with the wheelchair start, followed by the main race start at 7:00 AM. Both races will start and finish downtown along Congress Avenue. If you're not running or cheering, planning ahead is key. Road closures will be in effect, so check the traffic guide below to navigate the city smoothly. The first road closures begin Friday at 9 a.m. Then closures continue on the weekend through Sunday afternoon. All streets will re-open at 2 p.m. Find a detailed list of road closures and their corresponding times in the marathon's official traffic guide. Notable road closures are as follows: Congress Ave between Riverside Dr & Ben White from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. Westbound Ben White Frontage Rd between Congress Ave & 1st St from 5 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. 1st St Bridge between Riverside Dr to Cesar Chavez from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. Congress Ave Bridge between Riverside Dr to Cesar Chavez from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. To help navigate the traffic congestion expected during the Austin Marathon, organizers offer these helpful tips: Avoid Crossing the Course: Crossing the marathon route during the race is extremely difficult and should be avoided whenever possible. Strategic Parking: If you live near the race route, consider parking on the opposite side of the street to avoid being blocked in. Utilize Major Thoroughfares: MoPac Boulevard, Lamar Boulevard, and Interstate 35 offer relatively unobstructed northbound and southbound travel. Ben White Boulevard (Hwy 290) and RM 2222 (Koenig Lane) provide eastbound and westbound options. 45th Street remains open westbound between Red River and Guadalupe Streets. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin Marathon road closures will impact traffic this weekend
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Austin Marathon runner on trek to share his story, help Doctors Without Borders
Even before he understood the depth of his parents' work, Daryush Nourbaha was proud of what they did. It had to be something special. Spending stretches of his childhood in Iran, Nourbaha remembers seeing women lined up around the block, covered head-to-toe in traditional black chadors, waiting for their turn to visit with his mother. She was the first female physician the town had seen in ages. He also saw his father treat a shepherd who had stepped on a landmine left behind after the Iran-Iraq War. The shepherd's flock followed the man as he hobbled in unimaginable pain, on flesh that no longer resembled a foot, to reach the hospital where Nourbaha's father did his best to stitch him up. 'That image stayed with me,' Nourbaha recently told me, 'because he had walked for who knows how long to get some medical attention.' Those memories may be three decades old and a half a world away from Nourbaha's life here, living in Austin and overseeing workplace safety for an aerospace manufacturing facility in San Marcos. But as Nourbaha spent the past few months training for this weekend's Austin Marathon, on long runs and treadmill workouts, he thought about the conflicts in faraway places. He knows what suffering looks like. What could he do, as just one person, to help? He decided to use his race to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, to help others do the type of lifesaving work his parents had done through a different program. 'The purpose of a doctor in the middle of something so heinous going on — where humans are killing humans, dropping bombs, firing tanks and ammunition — the doctors there just want to do the best they can to keep people living and keep them healthy,' Nourbaha said. This isn't political for Nourbaha. It feels personal to him. Whatever you think about the issues in the headlines now — the question of U.S. dollars going to humanitarian aid around the world, our long-running debates over immigration and border enforcement — these aren't just policy fights in America. They affect people's lives around the globe. Nourbaha has dual citizenship — American and Italian — through his mother, and he has spent parts of his life on three continents. His father's family is in Iran, but he can't return there since he fled Iran after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Nourbaha was 17 then, living in Iran with his father but planning to rejoin his mother in New York. After 9/11 happened, it was unclear where America might strike in retaliation, and Nourbaha knew he would face two years of mandatory military service in Iran once he reached 18. 'It was like, 'What's going to happen now?'' Nourbaha said. 'I can't just sit around here and then start war with America,' the second home he loved dearly, having spent a chunk of his childhood in California. 'So that's when we found people who helped me across the border,' he said. Slipping into Turkey seemed like his best path back to America. A Kurdish-speaking Iranian man named Rasool, accustomed to smuggling wood and alcohol through Iraq, agreed to help. 'Every night we would walk for hours, and then we would be told, 'This is where we're going to stay tonight,'' Nourbaha recalled. They slept on the rocks under a starlit sky. One night, a panicked Nourbaha awoke to the sight of a man in a military uniform walking towards him. He nudged Rasool awake. Then they realized it was another guide, dressed to help them pass the next checkpoint. The night they crossed the border into Turkey, that guide told Rasool, 'Three days ago, four Afghans were killed right here.' After a two-week journey, Nourbaha reached the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. He presented his American passport. He was safe. He made it back to New York, but the way he left Iran came at a cost. He lost his Iranian citizenship, and, as he discovered when he flew last summer to Istanbul to try to visit his relatives for the first time in 22 years, he wasn't allowed back in Turkey, either. 'These political boundaries, they have serious personal ramifications,' he said. 'As a global society, we don't put enough thought into these sorts of things, especially in an interconnected world where people can just travel from Point A to Point B with such little difficulty.' Nourbaha knows he's fortunate. As an American, he's had security and opportunities. Now he hopes, by sharing his story and raising money for Doctors Without Borders, he can pay some of it forward. When he sees images in the news of buildings reduced to rubble in war-torn areas, 'I think about where are the people?' Nourbaha said. 'They're probably in a tent with Doctors Without Borders trying to tend to them. Wouldn't it be great to contribute to that?' Daryush Nourbaha has set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to benefit Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian organization that provides medical care to people affected by conflict, disease or disaster. Visit or learn more about the organization at Grumet is the Statesman's Metro columnist. Her column contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@ or via X or Bluesky at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin Marathon runner aims to help Doctors Without Borders | Opinion
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
University of Texas alum crawling the Austin marathon to raise sexual assault awareness
Summer Willis hated to run. As a senior in high school in Beaumont, she quit soccer because "we were running so much, and it filled me with the most anxiety." A year and a half ago, Willis, 30, who now lives in Houston, hit rock bottom after being diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder following a sexual assault her sophomore year at the University of Texas. Just three months from her 29th birthday, she decided she would run 29 marathons in a year to raise awareness about sexual assault. Having completed those 29 marathons in a year by October, Willis is returning to the marathon circuit on Feb. 16 for the Austin Marathon. This time, though, she'll be crawling the marathon. She'll start on the course at 8:00 the night before after being at a gala for Austin's SAFE Alliance, and crawl on her hands and knees with her husband, Andrew, staying beside her to make sure she doesn't get lost in the dark and is kept fed and hydrated. She'll use knee pads and tape her wrists, but she knows it will be a grueling feat. She expects to reach the finish line around 1 p.m. and will be joined by friends and family, her therapist, as well as Texas legislators who are helping her spirit bills protecting victims of sexual assault. Several bills, including Senate Bill 332 and House Bill 1714, would make it a sexual assault if the person "knows the other person is intoxicated by any substance such that the other person is incapable of appraising the nature of the act" or if the person "knows that the other person has withdrawn consent to the act and the actor persists in the act after consent is withdrawn." Several bills, including Senate Bill 127 and House Bill 1778, would remove the statute of limitations on prosecuting sexual assault. The idea to crawl came to Willis because recovery after a sexual assault is slow and painful, she said. "It felt like I was on hands and knees just trying to get by for years — trying to crawl back into the person that I used to be," she said. "It's also right now a crawl to get anything done: to get legal help, to get the rape kits that you need to get, the counseling. ... It just all feels like this really slow process, but there's also strength in that. There's strength in the slow recovery." Willis was inspired by another runner who had run 52 marathons in 52 weeks to raise money for pancreatic cancer research. Willis had just had a baby, was sleep deprived and out of shape, she said, but she knew she could do it. "I couldn't run a mile. I was overweight. I was depressed. but I had some running shoes, and I started training," she said. She did three marathons in three days in Lake Tahoe that October as her first entry into the world of marathons. She later did 13 marathons in eight weeks. Sometimes the marathons were just a mess. One time she forgot pants and had to have pants delivered to her through Uber, but the pants that arrived were almost see-through. Another time she forgot to pack deodorant. And for her first marathons, her luggage was lost, including her breast pump, which meant she could barely lift her arms while running because her breasts were so full with milk and no pump to express it. Willis' healing was about getting stronger through running and through writing and talking about her assault, which she never reported. "I needed to be the person that I used to believe that I could be before the rape, just someone who is strong and resilient and a fighter and someone who would do good," she said. "And so by running 29 marathons and sharing my story with the world, I guess that was me trying to be the person that I always believed I could be before." Coming back to Austin is always difficult. When she was last here, she went by the street where her assault occurred and just cried. She says she and a group of her sorority sisters went to a fraternity party where she was handed a drink. She believes that drink was laced with something because she has very little memory of that night. She does remember the bed and saying "no" over and over again. Then she remembers running along the street outside the fraternity house, falling on the ground and then taking a hot shower afterward. She later heard from people at the party what had happened to her, and she says the fraternity's underground newsletter published a narrative of that night's events, which included her rape, she said. She didn't tell anyone what had happened to her for more than a year. "Only 21% of people report that they were raped because it's humiliating and shameful," she said. During one marathon, she ran through New York's Central Park with a twin mattress strapped to her back to point out that during college, women are three times more likely to be sexual assaulted during their college years than at ay other time. The running has been therapeutic for Willis. "For a long time, for a decade, I just ran away from all the trauma, and this was my way of finally facing it head on," she said. "And then it turned into something way bigger than just myself." When she runs, fellow survivors of sexual assault will run along side her and tell her their stories. "At first that was really, really hard, because not only was I carrying my pain, I was carrying their pain," she said. "This is my way of turning pain into purpose and creating lasting change." Even today, when she feels stressed or is having a bad day, she'll go for a run. It's become her way to heal. She's created the nonprofit Strength through Strides and is working on creating a series of 5K races that will raise awareness about sexual assault and bring survivors and their loved ones together. She's also working an a film about sexual assault prevention and she is advocating for women to protect other women, especially during their college years. It's the advice she gave her own younger sister when she arrived at UT. That means noticing when someone has had too much to drink and making sure they get home OK, or telling a someone to "get lost" if they see that person being inappropriate to another person. She's also working on a national law to create a sexual assault victim's counselor at every college that receives federal funds. Today, she has a lot of gratitude for her husband Andrew, who is her biggest supporter, for sons Alfred, 3, and August, 1, who love to run with her or play Pokémon Go. "I don't even know if you ever can fully heal or recover," she said. "It is a crawl and it is an endurance race. I just want people to know that there's hope, and you can still have your happy ending. Although occasionally, I do feel sad and it was hard, I have my husband and my boys, and I'm so happy and blessed." This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: UT graduate crawling Austin Marathon to raise sexual assault awareness
