Mariana Hernandez, her black hair pulled back, lights up the room with a smile when talking about cross country.

It’s a sport the Southside junior stumbled into by accident.

But her love for running was put to the test late last spring when she underwent an unusual medical procedure with her heart.

“They (doctors) thought I was going to grow out of it,” she said. “Last year, at the end of track season, it started to affect me. I started to get really dizzy and I felt really bad.”

She passed it off as being dehydrated. Hernandez couldn’t have been more wrong.

Hernandez said her heart became the size of three regular hearts.

“I went to a cardiologist,” she explained. “They told me, ‘We’re going to have to put a cath in your heart.’ They told me they were going to use medicine to fix me or I was going to have open heart surgery, so I didn’t know.”

Hernandez’s parents, Sandra and Amilcar, knew otherwise.

And on May 30, 2018, her mom’s birthday, no less, Mariana Hernandez was prepped for surgery.


“My parents knew I was getting open heart surgery on May 30, but they never told me,” she said. “They were afraid I wouldn’t focus on school or with track. They were doing all these test on me and I was like, ‘Why? You’re just going to put a cath on me — it’s not really that bad.’

“Then I started crying because they told me I was going into surgery.”

Hernandez eventually stopped crying long enough and bravely put on a strong face.

“I didn’t want my parents to worry,” she said. “The next day I went in for surgery.”

It turns out Hernandez was healthy enough that surgery took less than 19 minutes.

So, she laced up her sneakers and bolted out of the front door.


Hernandez was running again in a very short time — much shorter than doctors first thought.


“They told me I had to wait six weeks,” Hernandez said. “But I kept on telling the doctors I wanted to go run. They finally let me. It was hard at first, but I think I’m OK now.”

A year later, Hernandez’s story isn’t something she boasted about with her teammates.

“I feel like most of them didn’t really know,” she said. “I didn’t really tell them, either. But I’ve gotten a lot closer to my girl teammates.”

Springy and light on her feet, Hernandez went to Kimmons Junior High with aspirations of becoming a volleyball player.

When she got to Southside, she stumbled into cross country.

“I heard about it in the eighth grade,” Hernandez said. “I started thinking about it. It sounded scary, but one day, during off-season volleyball, this coach was inside watching us run. He asked me, ‘Can you run like that for 20 minutes?’ I didn’t answer him because I was worried. I was thinking, ‘Twenty minutes?’

“Little did he know I had already run a marathon.”


Hernandez hit the floor running.

“I joined cross country and I loved it,” she said. “I feel like I’ve gotten better. This year I actually had a PR (personal best), and that was after the surgery, so I feel like I’ve gotten better.”

Hernandez’s top time in the 3,200 is 13:24; her best cross country time is 21:07.

“Honestly, thinking about the two-mile was really scary, (but) it’s not that bad. I like it.”

As for May 30, 2019? Her mom will have another birthday, but will Hernandez pause to remember last year’s surgery?

Nah, she’ll probably be running.


