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The Story of Adriana Nelson

Published by
RunnerSpace.com/RoadRacing   Nov 12th 2013, 1:29pm
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Top U.S. Woman in NYC Came a Long Way

Published by NYRR on November 11, 2013

It was 13 years ago that Adriana Pirtea arrived at the University of Texas-El Paso speaking but two words of English. If she answered ‘yes’ to something and got an odd look, she would think, “Ah, it must be ‘no.’”

Recruited by UTEP after a promising finish at 10,000 meters in the 2001 European U-23 Championships, Pirtea left her native Romania’s trees, lakes, and mountains, arriving in the harsher environs of El Paso after dark. She awoke to a strange new world.

After two weeks of intensive English training, Pirtea passed the test that would allow her to enroll, but she was unable to make sense of classes. She couldn’t take notes. She studied the language by watching closed-caption TV, and relied on her roommates and professors to correct her when she misspoke.

Pirtea graduated in 2005, married Jeremy Nelson in 2008 and became an American citizen in 2011. Last week, Adriana Nelson, 33, was the first female American finisher in the ING New York City Marathon, placing 13th in 2:35:05.

“I’m so humbled to be first American,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “The fact that I was the first USA runner made my day.”

Nelson added, however, that she has been “so hoping” to finish in the top 10, and had trained for the top 3. Although Buzunesh Deba and Tigist Tufa had taken off from the start on a breakaway, Nelson was still with the main pack until about mile 14, when “the whole group just ran away from me.”



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