Last week we told the story of the day 150 ran to Naivasha.
Headlamps. Viewpoint. Kijabe Hospital at 50km. Rain at noon. That long shoulderless stretch where the only option was forward.

But there was one thread we couldn’t fold neatly into the group story.

Because some of us didn’t just “hit the wall” that day.
One of us got hit by a car.

And yet… somehow… she’s still here. Still running. Still laughing. Still ungovernable, the word friends who know her best use without hesitation.

This is Valentine Lusigi. And this is the Naivasha story behind the Naivasha story.

Long before Naivasha, there was COVID.

Three months in ICU. Machines. Silence. Waiting.

When she emerged, life had shifted. She had lost vision in one eye and hearing in one ear. Speech therapy followed. Strength had to be rebuilt from scratch. Nothing was automatic anymore.

She could have accepted limitation.

She didn’t.

Running, for her, is more than distance or medals. It’s defiance. A quiet refusal to let disability define what she can or cannot do. Every kilometre is proof — to herself most of all — that she is still capable.

So when she stood on the road to Naivasha, she wasn’t chasing 88 kilometres.

She was doing what she has done since ICU:

Choosing forward.

“I can’t remember any of that”, she tells me, when I mention I arrived at the scene a few minutes after it happened.

“I can’t even remember being hit.”

That’s the thing about shock. It steals time. It erases minutes. It leaves you with blanks where the worst parts live.

What Valentine remembers isn’t the impact.
It’s waking up confused, being told what she was in Naivasha, having run there from Nairobi, and thinking: “I don’t do such crazy things.”

(Reader: she absolutely does.)

She was running near a guard rail. Her legs were tired. She made the decision to move slightly toward the road. Then—nothing. The next moment is other people’s voices, other people’s hands, other people’s kindness moving faster than fear.

And in the middle of all that, one detail stands out like a banner:

She didn’t lose anything.
Phone intact. Belongings intact. People protecting her like she was their own.

“Runners are magnificent people,” she says. And she means it.

Valentine doesn’t introduce herself as a runner first.

“I’m a fitness enthusiast,” she says. “About 15 years.”

She used to weigh over 100kg.
Gym. Spinning. Cycling. The whole package. The motivation wasn’t aesthetic. It was survival.

“Self-esteem… I couldn’t wear what I wanted… and the nail on the coffin was lifestyle diseases,” she says. “I was in my early 20s.”

Then the moment that hit hardest: she began passing out. And both her parents were diabetic—“and that is what took them down.”

So she made a decision. Not a cute one. Not an Instagram one. A real one.

She would move, consistently, until her life changed.

And it did. From 100kg+ to about 65kg. But she’ll tell you the real challenge wasn’t losing weight. It was maintaining a new life.

She started running in 2025, almost by accident.

A friend had a free ticket to Kilimanjaro Marathon. She took it. Signed up for 21km. And then discovered the first law of running:

The treadmill is a liar.

“By 10 kilometres, I was almost dead,” she says. “I didn’t know ‘respect the distance.’ I thought within one hour I’ll be done with this… I almost died.”

So she did what she always does when something challenges her.

She went all in.

She joined a club. Cut the gym down. Got mentored. Trained properly. And then, in her first year of running, she casually did what most people take years to build toward:

Three full marathons in a few months.
One of them unplanned. Registered for 21km. Ended up running 42km anyway.

“Strava does not lie,” she laughs.

By the end of 2025 she had 31 medals. All in one year.

People call her “ungovernable,” she says.
And honestly? It fits.

So why did she run to Naivasha?

It started with strangers. A random invite. A WhatsApp group. The kind of thing you ignore if you want a quiet weekend.

She didn’t ignore it.

She had also planned a staycation with family in Naivasha, so she thought: Why not run while they drive? Kill two birds with one stone.

And here’s the twist: her goal wasn’t even to finish 88km.

“My target was to get to 50,” she says. “Whatever happened after 50km is because I felt right.”

She’d conquered the Kimende nightmare, rising all the way from Nairobi to that 50km marker. She felt strong. So she kept going.

Then the side mirror bump came. A violent one. The kind that could end a runner’s story on the spot.

But it didn’t.

When she finally surfaced back into herself, what she met wasn’t judgment.

No “Why were you on the road?”
No “You shouldn’t have run to Naivasha.”
No fault-finding.

Just: How can we help?

Flowers. Fruits. Calls. Messages. Plans. Rehab programs. Contacts of people who had bounced back from accidents. Raymond, the run organiser visited. Her club captain showed up. Her employer organized her transfer to Nairobi.

And she says something worth underlining:

“That love fast-tracked my recovery.”

Two weeks later, she was moving again. Carefully. Slowly. But moving.

Because she refuses to “build a shrine” at her lowest place.

“You don’t stop the journey because you hit a bump,” she says. “That was a bump.”

And then she says the line that ties her story back to the road we all ran last week:

“I have unfinished business with Naivasha.”

Today, she’s already clocking serious mileage again. She’s done a half marathon. She’s training. She’s planning Two Oceans. And yes—she would run Naivasha again.

Not to prove a point.

But to remind herself—and all of us—that resilience isn’t loud. It’s simply the decision to keep going.

Sometimes that means running through the rain on a shoulderless road.
Sometimes it means getting up after impact, after stitches, after fear, after the world goes blank for fifteen minutes.

Either way, the lesson is the same.

Forward is forward.