Tom Fetterman gets a leg up. BY BOB FULTON

Before operating on a blood clot, Dr. Grayson Wheatley told Fetterman there was a possibility he would lose his right leg.

The 69-year-old retiree from Penn Run, Pennsylvania, feared he was finished as a runner, especially when he awakened following surgery and couldn’t feel the leg or see anything beyond the bulky bandage at his knee. After 88 marathons and hundreds of other races, the book had apparently closed on the remarkable running story of Tom Fetterman, ageless wonder.

Ayear later, the roles were reversed: It was Wheatley who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Told Fetterman had finished a marathon, Wheatley paused for a few moments, as if unable to comprehend the news, and then uttered a single syllable: “Wow.”

ES Eo *

J” Fetterman couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Fetterman had long led a charmed life as a distance runner. He put in his miles, stayed healthy, and regularly vanquished his contemporaries in everything from 5Ks to ultramarathons.

But Fetterman’s good fortune suddenly ran out on February 17, 2008. Several hours after he took top honors

Tom Fetterman, shown running the
2008 Lost Dutchman Half Marathon, has
recovered from a medical emergency
suffered only hours after he finished.

© Actionsportsimages.com

in his age group at the Lost Dutchman Half-Marathon in Apache Junction, Arizona, searing pain knocked him off his feet. Fetterman was rushed to Arizona Heart Hospital in Phoenix. The diagnosis: a blood clot.

Wheatley removed the clot and saved Fetterman’s leg, but Fetterman’s longdistance career seemed beyond saving.

“A couple of days later,” Fetterman recalled, “the doctor came into my room and I asked him, ‘How soon can I start running?’ He said, ‘I like your attitude, but I don’t think you’ll ever run another marathon.’ He didn’t tell me but he told my wife that, because of nerve damage, he didn’t know if I would ever get the use of my foot back.”

On February 15, 2009, almost a year to the day after surgery, Fetterman returned to Apache Junction and ran the Lost Dutchman Marathon, the 89th—and indisputably the most extraordinary—marathon of his running career. He took more than four hours to finish, but finish he did.

“He’s really a miracle patient,” Wheatley said. “Most people that come into the hospital, if the doctor tells them “You’re never going to walk normally again,’ they take that to heart and just kind of live with it.

“Fortunately,” he added with a chuckle, “Mr. Fetterman didn’t listen very well to his doctor.”

Eo * * When Fetterman launched his distance-running career, said distances were measured in feet, not miles. Even a brief jog would leave him doubled over, gasping for breath.

“Tused to laugh and call him ‘That’s-far-enough’ Fetterman, because he would run from one telephone pole to the next. He’d say, ‘That’s far enough,’” recalled Fetterman’s son, also named Tom, himself a marathoner. “But he got bit by the road racing bug, and one thing led to another.”

The soft-spoken great-grandfather has since completed 95 marathons and has tackled even longer races on occasion. Fetterman figures he has run 76,000 miles—the equivalent of three trips around the globe at the equator—since that day in 1980 when he resolved to give up a two-packs-a-day smoking habit, shed the excess 40 pounds he was carrying, and adopt a healthier lifestyle. If he hadn’t, Fetterman suspects, he would be “on the wrong side of the grass” by now.

Running probably saved him from an early grave, though he initially feared it was more likely than cigarettes to kill him.

“Tt was really tough at first,” Fetterman said. “I’d start down the road here and I’d go about one telephone pole, maybe two, and then say, ‘That’s far enough.’ Then I’d turn around and walk back home. But I just kept at it until I was able to make a two-mile loop. I thought I’d won the Olympics or something.”

What Fetterman has won since running his first race—a 10K in 1981—are hundreds of trophies, plaques, and medals that fill his home in Penn Run, a rural