Sharon Lokedi, the Kenya-born long distance runner won the 2026 edition of the Boston Marathon, completing the race in 2 hours, 18 minutes and 51 seconds, just a minute and 29 seconds slower than the course record she set in 2025. Lokedi won the Silver in 2024.
The first Boston Marathon was in 1897, but women were officially allowed to enter only 1972, although women had competed unofficially since 1996. Since 1972, when only eight women took part and all of them crossed the finishing line, over 200,000 women have completed the race. This year, 6,283 women entered the race and over 5,000 finished it.
Naturally it’s the winners who are talked about. It’s their names that are mentioned over and over again. And yet, each and every competitor in a marathon has a story. The mere fact of entering the race is something to applaud. Completion is a formidable victory in and of itself. The efforts of runners who don’t make a podium finish or are so far behind the pack of leaders after a few miles that commentators and cameras ignore them are nevertheless heroic. Each has an epic story but few get told.
Ivana Wijedasa. No one said ‘Ivana Wijedasa, remember the name!’ Not on television anyway. Ivana is not a professional athlete. Thousands take part in the annual race to prove something to themselves. That might have been an impetus in Ivana’s case as well, but she ran for another reason that had nothing to do with self-affirmation or personal glory.
She is a student, just about to graduate from the School of Law, Boston University. Running, for her, had nothing to do with competition. She ran along the scenic and iconic Charles River to decompress between classes.
That’s not entirely accurate. Ivan is the Co-President of the university’s Middle Eastern and South Asian Law Students Association, works as a research assistant, writes to the Law Review, volunteers as a tour guide and is active in the Immigration Law and Policy Society and Immigration Clinic. Neither is she ‘free’ in the summer for she has interned at the First Circuit Court of Appeals and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
That’s a full life, not even counting her social and personal engagements. She’s probably an ace at time-management. Many students are good at managing time or are forced to become good at it, but typically it’s all about academic and professional goals. Ivana ran uphill, in directions few choose; but what’s pertinent here is that Ivana gradually figured that her ‘decompression exercise’ could be channeled to something bigger than herself and her academic and professional goals.
The young Sri Lankan American law student raised over 15,000 US dollars for the Youth Advocacy Foundation (YAF) in the four hours, 31 minutes and 51 seconds she took to run the 26.2 miles on the 20th of April, 2026. The YAF is an organization dedicated to providing children with access to legal representation and quality education, which for her were ‘musts’ in the formidable task of putting an end to the tragic school-to-prison pipeline. That’s a marathon in itself.
For Ivana, who plans to donate an addition 5,000 dollars of her own funds to support the education of less fortunate children in Sri Lanka, her work for the YAF is founded on a simple but serious line of thinking: ‘It's something that I'm really deeply connected to in my career as an attorney.’ She believes that ‘It's really important that children are given the opportunity to have not just access to the council, but just have access to be a kid, to remain in these schools.’
On the 21st of April, a day after her exhausting run, Ivana turned 26. She finished more than two hours after Sharon Lokedi did. She’s one of over 550,000 finishers since 1897 and was the 10,347th in a field of 12,744 women runners and 25,030th out of 29,300 overall competitors, but these numbers mean nothing.
She’s not Sharon Lokedi. She’s Ivana Wijedasa, who turned 26 a day after the race, a young law student in whose heart there’s ample room for empathy and which was fuel enough for her to complete a storied race. She is Ivana Wijedasa, who proudly wore the Sri Lanka flag from start to finish. She is Ivana Wijedasa who put on a Royal College hat to support her father’s old school because the New York group of alumni from that school was the second largest donors.
She’s not done. Ivana will graduate this month. Where life will take her, we do not know, but we can say with some degree of certainty that she will run as long as she has to in order to add whatever she can to make this world safer and better for children. And for us all. It’s a podium-finish determination of a different kind than which Sharon Lokedi sought and secured. Gold of a different kind.
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. malindadocs@gmail.com
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