For South Sudan runner, just reaching London was a marathon - MiamiHerald.com

LONDON -- In Guor Marial's first marathon, he posted a time good enough to qualify for the Olympics. Perhaps that's because when he was growing up, he has said, he got used to running from people who were trying to kill him.

When Marial, 28, lines up for the marathon on Sunday, the final day of the London Olympic Games, it will mark the culmination of a remarkable journey from his war-torn homeland in Africa to the United States and on to the biggest athletic competition in the world.

It will be just his third time running the 26.2-mile race. The road he's traveled to get here must make that distance seem minuscule.

"I'm just going there and I will run the race and see what happens," he said by phone last week from Flagstaff, Ariz., where he was training.

Marial will be competing under special rules as an "independent Olympic athlete," representing no nation and running under the Olympic flag. His birthplace of South Sudan is a brand-new country, fresh from decades of conflict, without its own Olympic team. His adopted home, the United States, where he discovered his athletic gift, hasn't made him a citizen.

If Marial wins the gold - that isn't expected, but then again, little about his story is - the Olympic anthem would play on the medal stand. Perhaps that's only fitting for a man whose story seems to epitomize the Olympic ideal.

"Guor Marial is not a man without a team," said his friend Brad Poore, a Sacramento, Calif.-area lawyer who led the fight to get him invited to London. "The world is his team."

Marial was born in 1984 in a small village in Unity state in what is now South Sudan. At the time, though, his village was still part of Sudan, the vast, unruly East African nation that has been at war with itself for decades. In the conflict pitting the northern government against southern rebels, hardly any family was spared - certainly not Marial's own.

He lost eight of his 10 brothers and sisters, and many other relatives, either because of fighting or the privation and disease it unleashed. His family tried to send him to the north, to live with an uncle, but he was captured along the way and forced to work as a laborer. He was barely 10 years old.

He managed to return to the south only to be captured again, this time by a Sudanese soldier, whose family used him as an unpaid servant.

When he finally made it to the north, Sudanese authorities accused his uncle, a humanitarian worker, of helping the southern rebels. Security forces raided their home and attacked Marial and his aunt, breaking his jaw with the butts of their rifles. He and his aunt fled to Egypt, where they lived under the auspices of the United Nations before the United States took them in as refugees in 2001.

Marial enrolled in high school in Concord, N.H., at age 17 and got a 40-hour-a-week job stocking produce at a grocery store to send money back to his family in Sudan. He'd never really run before, but his P.E. teacher noticed something unusual.

"He said, 'You can run and run and never get tired,' " Marial recalled.

The cross-country coach, Rusty Cofrin, called him in for a tryout. Marial showed up in basketball shoes, and Cofrin looked skeptical. But once he started running, "the kid just floated," Cofrin said.

After a long circuit around a park and 1.5 miles on the track, Cofrin, an accomplished runner, saw that Marial seemed barely to have broken a sweat. "If you feel good, take off," Cofrin said.