Kelly Herron's Sexual Assault Story
She Fought Off an Assault on a Run — Here's Why She Teaches Self-Defense Now
Using Self-Defense Saved Her Life
At the workshop, she'd learned that making noise and fighting back could deter an attacker. "They can think that you're not worth the trouble, basically," Kelly said. When she opened her mouth to scream, she told POPSUGAR, the first words out were, "Not today, motherf*cker!" Then, she said, "I just started trying to fight back."
She started to claw at her attacker's face, gaining confidence when she saw he was starting to bleed. "I remembered from class that you don't have to throw the perfect punch," she said. "Just take hard bone to soft places. So I used my forearm to hit him in the side of the head, and it was actually kind of working." But Kelly was taking blows to the face. Her grip on consciousness started to slip.
Then she heard a voice in her head, the same one that had kicked in near the end of half-marathons she'd run — "when you just have a little bit further to go, and you're just totally spent," she recalled. "It was like, 'Come on, Kel. You've got this. Don't give up. Keep going.'"
With one last surge of adrenaline, Kelly slid out from under the bathroom stall where he'd cornered her and sprinted out the door. With the help of a few passersby, she locked the attacker in the bathroom and called the police. He came out without a fight, bruised and bleeding — "I felt good about that," Kelly said.
Kelly went to the hospital; in her state of shock, she remembered telling the paramedics, "I can just run there. I still need to get six miles in." The physical wounds, though, were brutal. Kelly needed stitches on her face, was bruised all over her body, and sustained a lower back injury.
