- May 4, 2024
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Despite being in a coma three months ago, Alessandra Buenner will still run the Tomoka Half Marathon.
It was a particularly gorgeous Christmas day for Alessandra Buenner. She was still floating high that ‘special feeling you get around the holidays,’ and she was going for a ride down East Granada Boulevard in preparation for the upcoming Tomoka Marathon. Flying down the Granada Bridge at 30 miles per hour, Buenner slowed down to 14 miles per hour make a left turn — and woke up in the hospital 12 days later.
“It’s that simple,” she said. “I don’t remember anything. When I woke up I said ‘What am I doing here?’ The doctors asked me if I knew who I was. My friend Sara Dean came in after and told me everything is going to be okay. Once you see that person that you trust so much, you are fine. It’s all in your head.”
Through three months of recovery at the Halifax Health, Buenner was able to get back on track with her life and her training. She credits her quick recovery to her mindset, and to the officers, nurses and doctors that took care of her. When her therapists weren’t exactly thrilled that she was still training for the half marathon, she shrugged it off because she knew which route of recovery she wanted to take.
“I don’t follow the rules exactly,” she chuckled. “You have to know what does and doesn’t apply to you. You take good advice from someone who has the knowledge to determine where you are, but you are also someone who determines who you are. You have to combine those things and move.”
Running for 22 years, Buenner also did some cycling and swimming for triathlons.
“I’m blessed to be so in love with such a lazy sport,” Buenner said. “I call it lazy because you don’t need anything. Running is very simple. You just need yourself or a group, and you can do it anywhere.”
Buenner volunteers at the YMCA, works as a massage therapist and is a mother of two girls and one boy. Originally from Venezuela, that’s where most of her family remains, but Buenner said she’s made a real family out of her friends in Ormond Beach.
“My family here are my friends,” She said. “Sara Dean and Mica Cyrus, if it wasn’t for them it would not be the same. Eventually family is more than who you were born with. It’s the people that go with you through everything. The think and the thin.”
Today, Buenner continues to train with a smile and bruises on her knees — but don’t think for a moment that they were from her Christmas fall. Scrapes and cuts are just a part of the runner’s uniform according to her. And though the doctors still aren’t sure what caused the collapse and short coma, Buenner doesn’t spend anytime dwelling on it.
“At this time, I am alive and I have everything together,” she said. “What else is there?”
