Kelly Herron was out for a Sunday run when she encountered what she called her “biggest running nightmare.”
At mile four of her marathon training run, she stopped to use the bathroom at Golden Gardens park in Seattle on March 5. “As I was drying my hands, I became aware that something was wrong,” she ABC News. It was then she turned around and saw a man standing in the bathroom.
“He immediately took me down to the ground, hit both my knees and legs, and then it was a fight on the bathroom floor,” she told ABC. “And I just kept screaming, ‘Not today, motherfucker!’”
Herron escaped into a stall, but it wasn’t long until the man entered from the side and “started beating me in the face with his hand,” she said.
She began clawing at his face and using whatever self-defense techniques she had just learned in a class at work. However, at one point, she “started to feel like I was going to lose consciousness,” she said, “but I got another surge of adrenaline, and I reached for the door and was able to get out.”
Eventually, a bystander helped her lock the man in the stall until police came.
During the attack, the GPS in her fitness tracker detailed the gnarly back and forth in the bathroom, which you can see in the left bottom corner of her Instagram post above.
The perpetrator, 40-year-old registered sex offender Gary Steiner, faces charges of attempted rape and second-degree assault.
The attack hasn’t deterred Herron from further training for the Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon this summer, though. “My face may be stitched, my body is bruised, but my spirit is intact,” she wrote on Instagram.
