Kevin C. Cox/Getty ImagesBy ALEXANDRA SVOKOS, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Aliphine Tuliamuk, who won the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials last February, gave birth to a girl, her first child, she announced Monday morning.
“Our daughter Zoe Cherotich Gannon arrived on 1/13/2021 and she is absolutely perfect. Her dad and I are just so overwhelmed with joy love and gratitude, and we can’t stop staring at her,” she wrote on Twitter.
She made the announcement on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and noted on Instagram that her daughter was born just two days before the civil rights icon’s birthday — “so close!” In his memory, she wrote, “may we all be proactive and do the right thing.”
The marathoner announced she was pregnant in early December, posting on Instagram, “[Partner] Tim [Gannon] and I always knew that we wanted to have a family, the goal was post 2020 Olympics, well as it turned out this year had other plans, by mid April we were convinced that there will be no more races this season, and the darkness ahead was too much, we created our own light at the end of the tunnel!”
Gannon and Tuliamuk, 31, got engaged earlier this year.
“Her journey to this world was relatively long but ‘easy,'” Tuliamuk expanded on Instagram about her daughter’s birth, adding with some emojis, “I was up and walking around a few hours after she arrived, like give me a race right now …kidding.”
Tuliamuk, who was born in Kenya and became an American citizen in 2016, according to NBC Sports, is still planning to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, should they be held this summer.
Her running accomplishments includes national road titles over 25k, 20k and 5k, according to New York Road Runners, and she finished 12th for women at the 2019 New York City Marathon and second at the 2015 Pittsburgh Marathon.
“It’s not like in the past where women were told, well, you can just race until you’re done racing, and then you can start a family,” she told NBC Sports in December. “You can do both of them.”
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