Jim.henderson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Two fifth-grade teachers from an Upper East Side public school ran Sunday’s NYC Marathon, and one of them crossed the finish line after being treated for cancer earlier this year.
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Both teach at P.S. 158 Bayard Taylor, on York Avenue between 77th and 78th streets. Karolina Boynton, 35, finished in 4 hours, 36 minutes and 23 seconds. She had a thyroidectomy for thyroid cancer in January and radiation in April before training for the race, as Susan Edelman reported on her Substack. Her colleague Cara Cherepakhov ran her first marathon and finished in 5:25:07.The two also coach the school’s track club, along with several other colleagues. The club draws about 90 fourth- and fifth-graders a year. Groups meet in the gym at 7:30 a.m. twice a week to train before classes start at 8:30, and in the spring they do a weekly run of 2½ to 3 miles on the East River footpath, with some parents joining in. This year Boynton was one of 50 runners from across the U.S. and Canada picked for Team TCS Teachers, which gives VIP race entries to standout educators. About 60,000 runners started the race in Staten Island.
Her students were waiting for her around mile 16 on First Avenue, a block from their school. Boynton told Edelman she’d flown through the first half but was hurting badly by then, and she pushed through because she didn’t want her students to see her struggling. When she reached them, they held up signs, gave her high fives and hugs, and handed her bananas. “They WERE my Gatorade,” she said. She told Edelman the kids gave her the energy boost she needed to keep going.
Boynton brings that same idea into her classroom, where she has students write about overcoming challenges and working toward their goals. In a 2019 Team TCS Teachers video, she said she sees her students as part of her journey, and that she wants them to feel proud of her and someday find the drive to do whatever they want, even when it’s hard.
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Her health story goes back further than this year. In 2016, at 26, Boynton had a preventive double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation, which raises the risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Her mother, Urszula Krauze, also carried the mutation. Krauze was diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer in 2014 and recovered, then died of COVID-19 in 2020 at 63. Boynton, who has described running as therapy, ran her first NYC Marathon in 2017.She’d run eight marathons before Sunday, three of them in New York, and her best time here was 4:14, in 2021. This one was her first as a mother of two. Boynton, a native New Yorker, lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with her husband, Ryan, and their sons, Tate and Odin, who cheered her on as the course passed through their neighborhood.
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