How many miles can you run without stopping? Five? Three? One? Try 135. That’s how many miles Helene Neville is set to run here in town starting January 29. It’s a lot of miles, even for most avid runners. But Neville isn’t your average athlete. At 55, she’s also a four-time cancer survivor.
“I want to do it, really to say thank you to Las Vegas and the community for their unwavering help and love and support,” says Neville, who set a record in September for her five-year run along the perimeter of the continental U.S. The feat covered more than 9,600 miles in 334 nonconsecutive days, averaging roughly 25 miles a day. It took her five years, one of which Neville had to sit out due to cancer treatment.
“I literally was out there every day on the route by myself, with whatever I needed to survive, for that day, on my back,” she says about that perimeter run, which she broke up into four legs, one each year. The first cancer survivor, grandmother and nurse to complete the perimeter run, Neville finished the final leg from St. Stephen in New Brunswick, Canada to Ocean Shores, Washington in September of 2015. While a handful of people have attempted to walk the U.S. perimeter, only three had completed an entire perimeter run until Neville’s success, and all of them were under age 30 when they finished, she says.
On her next quest, Neville will run nonstop laps between the south Strip “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign and the “Welcome to Fabulous Downtown Las Vegas Sign” at Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont. The 135-mile marker represents every mile she ran on her last transcontinental leg to Washington. “I’m actually going to shoot to try to get done in maybe 38 hours. I’m going to try for four miles an hour, which would bring me to 35 or so,” she said, though she’ll have to account for stops and foot traffic along the way.
As if Neville’s story wasn’t amazing already, the four-time cancer survivor had another surgery in November, followed by another round of oral chemotherapy. She was in bed for a month—then back out training. “I feel good,” Neville says. “You should make every day count. That’s how I do it. It’s a good way to decompress. It’s like therapy.”
A runner since high school, it wasn’t until the '90s—after chemotherapy and three brain surgeries—that Neville signed up for the Chicago Marathon. “The day I decided to run was the day I left the hospital,” Neville recalls. “They called me and told me my immune system was pretty shot and I probably wasn’t going to get better, so I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to go run a marathon.’ We’ll see about that.”
She kept running, and then took up bodybuilding and mountain climbing, too. “I just kept doing everything they told me not to,” she says, although she’s quick to add that beating cancer isn’t what ignited her passion for fitness. “It wasn’t cancer that inspired me to get healthy … I didn’t run because I was sick. It doesn’t really define me—I’m just a person that had it more than once. Maybe having cancer, it may have afforded me the opportunity to display my strength.” The strength she’s always had.
A Las Vegan since 2011, Neville says it was the local community that supported her throughout her record-setting trek, as well as her battle with cancer. “It’s so underrated or underreported, how awesome people are here. That’s really what inspires me to do this run,” she says. “I just want to thank everybody.”
Neville will be hosting her Healthy Nurse Conference and National Nurses Half Marathon in March.
