Gabriela Camina Herrera

Happy birthday to Spain’s Gabriela Camina, who came back to the track this May and ran the fastest 800m of her life doing it.

On 16 May in Pamplona, in the second round of the Liga Iberdrola, Gabriela ran 2:13.79 over 800m, a lifetime best. Four days later she posted about it, and the caption is better than any summary of it: back agaiiin, learning to enjoy athletics with a different mentality, and happy to be able to put spikes on again after so long. It drew nearly eighteen hundred likes, by a distance the biggest response anything on her account has ever had, which tells you how many people had been waiting for exactly that post.

There is a particular kind of courage in that sequence, and it is not the kind that shows up in a results database. Coming back is easy to talk about and extremely hard to do, because the first race back is public and the clock is indifferent and everyone can see the number. Gabriela came back and the number was the best one she had ever run.

She races for Grupompleo Pamplona Atlético in Spain’s División de Honor, having come up through A.D. Marathon in Madrid, where she was winning regional medals as a junior. She is an 800m runner who is not precious about it either, with a cross country record and a 10km road time to her name. And she is studying psychology, which is a fairly interesting detail next to an athlete who chose to frame her own return around mentality rather than around fitness.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Gabriela! ¡Muchas felicidades, mucha salud y muchísimas vueltas más a la pista! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇪🇸