He's Run 4 World Marathons — Pushing His Wife the Whole Way

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Today, on the other side of the world, in Sydney, Australia, a woman who has never run a single step on her own is about to finish her fifth marathon.

She won't take one stride of it herself. Her husband will carry every mile for her — and he's been doing it since 2019.

Amy Shinneman was born with a body that never quite explained itself. As a child, she didn't walk on time, and doctors spent years guessing. It wasn't until 2018 that a DNA test finally gave her an answer: Bethlem myopathy, a rare form of muscular dystrophy that slowly weakens the muscles throughout the body. Today, at 52, Amy gets around mostly by wheelchair. For most of her life, running wasn't just difficult. It was off the table entirely.

Her husband, Jamie, was the opposite — a lifelong athlete who only discovered distance running when his sons took up the sport, chasing them around a track. As CBS News reported this week, Jamie was fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon not once, but twice. And it was at the Boston Marathon Expo, spotting a racing wheelchair on display, that he had an idea that would change both of their lives.

Amy, by her own admission, wanted nothing to do with it at first. She'd spent her whole life feeling stared at, and the idea of being wheeled through a crowded marathon course, in public, on display, terrified her. But Jamie kept asking. And in 2019, she said yes.

They call themselves a Duo Team. Jamie is the engine — the legs, the lungs, the miles. Amy is what she calls the compass. Since that first race, they have crossed the finish line together four times, completing the Berlin, Boston, Chicago, and New York marathons — four of the most competitive, most demanding races on the planet. Amy has said that if she closes her eyes during a race, she can almost feel the sensation of running herself, just from the speed of it.

Today, that number becomes five. The Shinnemans are racing the Sydney Marathon, the next stop on their quest to complete all eight Abbott World Marathon Majors, the most elite series in the sport. When they cross that finish line, they'll have three left: London, Tokyo, and Cape Town.

But finishing the majors was never really the point. Amy and Jamie built a nonprofit around this journey called Team Humbly Courageous, aimed at helping other people with disabilities believe something like this is possible for them too. For this race alone, they set out to raise twenty-six thousand dollars — ten percent going to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the rest going toward buying a racing wheelchair for another Duo Team that otherwise couldn't afford one.

That's the part of this story that sticks with me. Amy didn't just find a way to run. She and Jamie built a way for someone else to run too.

And it's worth sitting with what Amy has said about all of this. For years, she thought of herself as the one on the sidelines — the wife in the lawn chair, cheering while her husband and sons crossed finish lines without her. Being an athlete herself, being someone other people cheered for, wasn't a role she ever thought she'd get to play. Now, five races in, she says every finish line makes her a little more certain she can handle whatever this life asks of her next.

It's easy to think of a marathon as a test of one person's body. What the Shinnemans have spent seven years proving is that it can just as easily be a test of one couple's devotion — twenty-six point two miles at a time, four majors down, four to go.

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Sources: cbsnews.com · mdaquest.org

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