Latoya Sauntay Snell was close, she almost let negativity take away the joyful moment she had been working so hard for.
The moment where she crossed the finish line at the New York City Marathon marking the eighth marathon she’s completed in four years.
She was running her last four miles when a spectator decided to yell out a mean comment in the midst of great event where everyone was having a good time.
“But between the 22nd and 23rd miles of the New York City Marathon, my home-stretch high was disrupted by a tall, balding white man who felt it appropriate to shout, ‘It’s gonna take your fat ass forever, huh?'” she explained in an article for The Root.
Layota stopped and cursed the guy out, but her fellow female runners stopped to told her it wasn’t worth it and to continue. She didn’t want to continue wasting the energy she needed to run the race on some miserable bald guy who wasn’t even competing.
So she kept on running but still had the guy’s comments on her mind.
“By mile 23, my mind was in a boxing ring, enraged by the man who tried to rope-a-dope my headspace. He didn’t know what I’d sacrificed to be there; how I’d contemplated abandoning a sport I often refer to as ‘oxygen’ because I was still grieving the miscarriage of my twins in August,” she wrote. “He didn’t know I’d had emergency surgery for endometriosis, or the 142 times over the course of a year that I’d been called everything from ‘fat bitch’ to the n-word online, simply for being a black, plus-size food-and-fitness blogger.”
He didn’t realize that she got through those hard times by running which allowed her to lose 50 lbs. He just saw a plus size runner and decided to try to bait her with negativity.
“And I—an exhausted runner who was so close but still so far from the finish line—fell for the bait, as he lured me with insults,” she said.
She decided to put that all behind her and happily crossed the finish line knowing that she was proud of herself and all that she has accomplished.
“I’m fat. Full-figured. Thick. Plus-size. Powerful. Capable. Empowering. Phenomenal,” she wrote. “And in the end, my real clapback that day came from the power of my thick legs shuffling me from New York’s Staten Island, across five boroughs and ending in the drizzling rain in Manhattan. I am powerful because I believe that I am. And I owe nobody an explanation for what moves me.”
Can we get a “Yass, queen!”
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