CNN
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Maya Merhige eventually stopped counting her jellyfish stings, such was the frequency with which they were getting scorched against her skin.

At this point, Merhige was already several hours into her 27-mile swim across the Cook Strait in New Zealand and had slowly become immune to the small, burning sensations that covered her body. By the end, even her face – her nose, ears and lips – had been peppered with them.

“Constantly, like 25 times a minute – over and over,” is how often the 17-year-old Californian estimates that she was being stung. That equates roughly to once every third stroke – an aggressive form of exposure therapy for someone who claims to be terrified of jellyfish.

“Even when I was getting in the water, I was already like: ‘I’m so scared. I don’t want to see jellyfish,’” adds Merhige. “So the entire time I was just fighting myself mentally to kind of get over that fear.”

Confronting her greatest fears is something that Merhige has done time and again while swimming in some of the world’s most challenging and unforgiving waters.

Crossing the Cook Strait, which separates New Zealand’s North and South Islands, last month was another step towards her goal of becoming the youngest person to complete the Oceans Seven – a series of brutal open water swims around the globe.

Merhige has now successfully traversed the Cook Strait, the Moloka’i Channel in Hawaii, the Catalina Channel off the coast of Los Angeles, and the English Channel between England and France – all before graduating from high school.

Still on her to-do list are the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland, the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, and the Tsugaru Strait in Japan.

“I’m hoping to be the youngest, which means that I have to do them by January of 2028,” Merhige says. “I am hoping to finish them all. I’m really excited for the ones I have left.”

In line with Marathon Swimmers Federation guidelines, only swimsuits – not wetsuits – can be used by those undertaking solo, unassisted marathon swims in open water.

Merhige is guided by a support boat and pauses to receive a feed from her crew every half an hour. The Cook Strait crossing, she says, was her hardest swim to date – which became clear the following day when she struggled to lift her arms above shoulder height.

The physical toll of taking stroke after stroke for more than half a day was compounded by choppy seas and strong currents, meaning Merhige swam 27 miles instead of 13.7 and was in the water for more than 14 hours instead of the planned seven.

But it was her mental resolve that was tested most of all, especially when the large wind turbines marking the end of the swim never appeared to be getting any closer. The best solution, Merhige thought, was to stop obsessing over the distance and just keep swimming.

It’s one of the reasons she prefers tackling her marathon swims at nighttime, unable to fret about how far she has to go or what sea creatures might be lurking in the ocean below.

“If I can’t see them, I really just tell myself: out of sight, out of mind,” says Merhige – referring, of course, to those much-feared jellyfish. “They’re not there if you can’t see them, so I just pretend it’s not happening, which does help me shut my mind off a little bit.”

Another perk to crossing the Cook Strait at night – which Merhige did for almost the entirety of the swim – was catching a glimpse of shooting stars and avoiding the heat of New Zealand’s punishing midday sun.

And no sun exposure means no risk of sunburn. That’s useful, Merhige points out, if you have your high school prom in a few days’ time and want to avoid arriving with a swimming cap tan across your forehead.

As obstacles go, a poorly-timed tan line is a relatively minor one when it comes to swimming in some of the world’s most dangerous waters.

When swimming the length of Lake Tahoe in 2022, Merhige struggled so much that she started to get hallucinations – “I thought that I had been kidnapped for part of it, thought I was swimming with human-sized stuffed animals,” she says – and had to negotiate sharks, seals, whales and dolphins during her Moloka’i Channel crossing the following year.

But for all the many challenges she encounters during her swims, Merhige still insists that she is happier in the water than anywhere else. It is, she explains, a “safe place” in which she sees herself as a visitor to an environment which isn’t, and will never be, entirely hers.

“It’s become this great relationship,” says Merhige. “I love being in the water so much, and I’m definitely loving it more and more; I have much more respect for the ocean and for the water than I did when I started swimming.

“I’ve done so much mental gymnastics in the water that I can adapt myself to deal with whatever situation occurs. Even if I’m scared, I know I can get through that fear. That’s what keeps me safe, and that’s what makes me feel safe.”

Merhige has now completed 10 marathon swims, which by definition measure at least 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) in length.

With nonprofit Swim Across America, she has raised more than $130,000 for pediatric cancer research, a cause motivated by some of her close family friends who have been affected by the disease.

The thought of those living with cancer is what motivates Merhige during some of her darkest, most grueling hours in the water.

“There are kids in the hospital, literally right now, who are going through chemotherapy and going through radiation, and if they can get through that, then I can keep swimming, and it’s nothing,” she says.

“I’m just telling myself that over and over and thinking: ‘This is bigger than me. There are people cheering me on, and there are people going through cancer that I’m doing this for’ … I know that this is making a bigger impact outside of just me, and that’s really important.”

Merhige, too, has faced her own recent health challenges. In March 2023, she ruptured a benign tumor on her pancreas during a skiing crash, causing intense pain and requiring surgery.

She was back in the water two weeks after the surgery, and then last year, two months after she was in and out of hospital for further treatment, Merhige completed her crossing of the English Channel.

More surgery is on the horizon this summer, meaning another Oceans Seven swim isn’t on the cards this year. That will have to wait until 2026, when Merhige hopes to complete two, maybe three, of the remaining swims during her first year at college.

She’s currently on a pre-med track and hopes to be at a school on the East Coast – the opposite side of the country to her hometown of Berkeley.

“I don’t think any of my top schools are remotely near water,” says Merhige, “but I’m going to find lakes, I’m going to find rivers. I’m going to make it work.”

The water, Merhige adds, is the place where she feels “the most myself,” and she has no intentions to wave goodbye to that part of her identity while at college. But one bonus of being on the East Coast? The jellyfish will be very, very far away.

CNN
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On marathon day, the air thrums with emotion. Tune into any frequency and you will find it – elation, anxiety, exhaustion, pain, pride, awe, pathos.

More than 56,000 runners will line up on the start line of the London Marathon on Sunday, each one with a different reason for being there.

Many find that motivation in running for the charities which have helped them or their loved ones during the darkest times in their lives – the London Marathon has raised over £1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) since its inception. Others find it by using running to control their physical and mental health, set themselves goals or try a new challenge.

For Julie Wright, those two go hand-in-hand. Four years ago, her daughter Vicki died at the age 34 from breast cancer, leaving behind two young sons. And as Wright spent more and more time looking after them, she realized she had to get fitter.

“We take so much for granted when we’re younger … and as we get older, we think we can still do it … we think we can just pick up a skipping rope and skip and it’s not like that at all,” she tells CNN Sports.

At the same time, running helped Wright in “some really, really dark places” after the loss of her daughter. She settled on the idea of a marathon “to celebrate getting to 60 and still being alive,” as well as to raise money for Breast Cancer Now.

Now targeting her third marathon, Wright, her family, and her community have raised thousands of pounds for the charity.

The lingering presence of her daughter and mother, who passed away in January, accompanies Wright on her runs. On one hand, she wears her mother’s wedding ring, and on the other, she wears a gold band her daughter gave her just before she died.

“I’ve got mom on one finger and (Vicki) on the other … So when I’m having to dig really deep, I put my hands behind myself a little bit as if I’m flying … and it’s like I pretend I’m grabbing Mum’s hand on one side and my daughter’s on the other,” she says.

“And that gets me through the next five minutes. And once I’ve got through that next five minutes, I’m just getting on.”

Similarly, for 19-year-old twins Katie and Anna Rowland, the memory of their dad Jim sustains them through long training runs as they raise money for the Southern Area Hospice, which cared for him in his final days.

“If someone can lie in a hospital bed … and the pain that they can be in, I remember the pain daddy was in … if I can run for four, five hours, it’s nothing compared to what they can do,” Katie tells CNN Sports.

The pair signed up for the marathon on a whim after seeing a Facebook post from the hospice, in an attempt to “say thank you” and to give “a bit of money for what (they) did for us,” Anna adds.

There is power in running for a cause, says David Wetherill, a former Paralympic table tennis player aiming to set a world record for the fastest marathon while using crutches, a feat he estimates will involve completing around 42,000 dips – about one every meter.

“It’s a struggle for me to even walk 250 meters,” he says, explaining his hip is currently not in its socket due to multiple epiphyseal dysplasia – a genetic disorder which affects bone growth and leads to early onset arthritis.

“So it is mad to try and explain that I’m then going to go and run a marathon, but it’s so much easier for me to motivate myself to do the extraordinary than to do the mundane in my life, even though the pain levels are pretty much the same,” he tells CNN Sports.

Putting himself through such a grueling task, Wetherill says, is only possible by maintaining a stoic mindset – “if it’s endurable, endure it” – and because of his commitment to raise money for research seeking a cure for type 1 diabetes.

Two of his best friends and one of their young daughters all have the condition. Wetherill says his friends’ purpose has “become my purpose.”

“When it’s you at stake, that’s nowhere near as powerful as people you really really love,” he adds.

And in the process of training, Wetherill has become “addicted” to pushing his body, drawing from a “perverse kind of motivation, where I lean into the pain, the cure for pain is in the pain.”

Signing up to a marathon means committing to weeks of training beforehand, juggling work and family commitments at the same time. For the past few months, Luke Roche has balanced his full-time job in sales with raising two children under two and his marathon training, often waking up at four or five in the morning to go for a run before work.

“I could not have done it without (my fiancée) Beth,” he tells CNN Sports. “If I could get a second (medal) I would because she’s done just as much helping me train as I’ve done for myself.”

Running a marathon means so much to Roche that when he found out he had secured a place, it “broke” him, he remembers, his voice cracking. “It all fell into place. It was running for my granddad, running for my mate. It meant a lot,” he says.

Roche is running to raise money for The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity long supported by his late granddad who sponsored one of the donkeys there, visited it often, and made it the subject of the collection at his funeral. “I thought (it) was brilliant, so random and very unique and very him,” Roche says.

And by taking part in the marathon this year, Roche can run it with his friend who is running in memory of his 18-year-old sister who passed away last year.

“That’s why I am running the marathon!” Jennie Toland says as one of her daughters interrupts to ask a question. “She’s the reason why.”

Before having her daughter Rose, now aged three, Toland had suffered seven consecutive miscarriages. “I had no energy left, I was mentally just distraught,” she recalls. “It’s a lot of grief and a lot of seeing your life go in a completely different direction from where you thought it was going to go.”

Every doctor had told her and her husband to stop trying for a baby and, as a last resort, Toland was up late one night, scouring the internet for any glimmer of hope.

There, she stumbled across Tommy’s – a charity which funds research seeking to stop miscarriage, stillbirth and premature birth. She took part in a clinical trial funded by the charity and, though she still doesn’t know if she had the medication or the placebo, she has since had two children.

“We started talking about how to say thank you, because sending someone … a nice letter when they’ve given you your whole life … it just doesn’t seem enough to say thanks,” she says.

“I just wanted to do something. And then I watched a marathon last year and thought that’s a really good idea. And I’ve since been questioning those life choices.”

In the last seven years alone, the number of people applying to run the London Marathon has more than doubled, rising from 386,000 in 2018 to more than 840,000 this year.

Sunday’s race is expected to set the record for the most participants in a marathon, surpassing the 55,646 finishers at last year’s New York City Marathon.

The 26.2-mile distance continues to appeal for novice and experienced runners alike. Josh Elston-Carr, co-founder of FLYCARB and a former track runner who has recorded a sub-four-minute mile, turned to the marathon in search of a new challenge when his love for middle-distance running began to fade slightly.

When Elston-Carr first took up running as a junior 20 years ago, he joined an athletics club, the “traditional route in” at the time. Over the past two decades, he has seen more and more people take up an increasingly accessible sport thanks to “the rise of parkrun and run clubs,” he tells CNN Sports.

The running bug can be addictive. Liz Newcomer, a running influencer, never intended to compete in marathons. She began running “two or three miles every other day” as a way to improve her mental health and feared longer distances before her manager suggested running a half-marathon.

“Even after the half, the next weekend I ran 13 miles again, and then the next weekend maybe I ran 14 and … I realized that I really loved it. And it got to a point where people asked me, ‘Are you training for a marathon?’”

Five years on and Newcomer is preparing for her 10th marathon, transformed by distance running. The sport, she says, has helped her deal with “body image issues” and a relationship with food that “wasn’t super great at the time.”

“I definitely see my body more as like a car and when I need to eat, to fuel the car, I see it more as … something where I have to fuel for performance,” she says.

El Segundo, California
AP
 — 

Luka Dončić has stepped up to pay the entire expected cost of restoring a vandalized mural depicting Kobe and Gigi Bryant in downtown Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Lakers’ new guard made a $5,000 donation Tuesday to cover the entire goal of a GoFundMe page created by artist Louie Palsino. He wants to restore the mural, titled “Mambas Forever,” at 14th and Main streets.

“It was always important to give back to the community,” Dončić said after practice at the Lakers’ training complex. “They gave me so much, so I just want to give back.”

The Slovenian superstar joined the Lakers less than three months ago in a blockbuster trade with the Dallas Mavericks.

He teamed with LeBron James to lead the Lakers to the Pacific Division title and the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference playoffs, but Los Angeles is on the brink of elimination Wednesday night when the Minnesota Timberwolves visit for Game 5 with a 3-1 series lead.

Bryant spent his entire 20-year career with the Lakers, winning five championships and becoming the top scorer in franchise history. After Kobe and Gigi Bryant died in a helicopter crash in January 2020, hundreds of murals and public art projects honoring them sprung up around Southern California.