A Young Pastor Has Died After Going Into Cardiac Arrest at the Portland Marathon

Trey Lara had about six miles of the Portland Marathon still to run on Sunday when he went into cardiac arrest, according to a GoFundMe for his family, set up by Kari Ahearn, a fellow member of his church denomination. His family was with him when he died in the hospital that day. The 24-year-old pastor would have turned 25 later this month.

The race’s organizer, Motiv Sports, has not released the runner’s name, citing privacy. In a statement to KGW, managing director Crystian Kumnick thanked “the team members and first responders who came to the runner’s aid.” Organizers had called Sunday’s 54th edition the largest in the race’s history, with almost 15,000 entrants across four races, from the marathon down to a kids’ run, KGW reported.

Lara had recently gone to work for the Foursquare Church, where, Ahearn told KGW, he was “working on developing young leaders and their leadership potential.” “He was only 24, but he was already a pastor,” she said. Youth ministry was the work he shared with his wife, Audrey, and Camp Genesis, which they opened this summer, uses the campground where Audrey, then 12, met Trey. They had been married almost five years. By Thursday the fundraiser had brought in more than $56,000 toward a $70,000 goal, to pay for the funeral and his hospital care and to give his family time to grieve.

Audrey caught him at miles 10 and 14, KGW reported on Tuesday, and at 18 he made his way over to her. “He ran over, was able to give me a kiss, was smiling, and then ran off. He looked good,” she told the station. The next she heard of him was a phone call from her mother-in-law: “she’s like, they’re doing CPR.” Lara had been training for months, she told KPTV, and running was “a way to like relax and release.” Two days on, she told KGW, “We’re all still in a little bit of shock.”

On the same day, John Meise, 36, collapsed in the final mile of the Milwaukee Lakefront half-marathon and died, and Run 4 Wales has confirmed that a participant in Sunday’s Cardiff Half Marathon has also died. On Sept. 13, two 25-year-old men died after collapsing at England’s Great North Run. No cause has been made public in any of the other cases.

Researchers behind the Race Associated Cardiac Arrest Event Registry (RACER) counted 176 cardiac arrests among 29.3 million finishers of U.S. marathons and half-marathons from 2010 to 2023, according to their 2025 study in JAMA. The risk was 1.04 per 100,000 for marathoners and 0.47 for half-marathoners, and men were affected about six times as often as women. A third of those arrests ended in death, compared with 71 percent from 2000 to 2009. “We are doing a better job at resuscitating them,” Aaron Baggish, the study’s senior investigator, told TCTMD. Of the 36 cases with complete records, every runner got CPR from a bystander, and three of the runners who died had no defibrillator available to them.