During the three spring races of 2023, the Abbott World Marathon Majors team set out to tell the stories of three individuals who would become Six Star Finishers.
The Six Star journey is a quest taken up by tens of thousands of runners aiming to complete the Grand Slam of mass participation sport.
Each year, some of them reach their goal of completing all Six Abbott World Marathon Majors races. For some, it's a journey that takes years, even decades to reach its conclusion.
However long or short the mission, each Six Star story is unique, from the fastest elite athlete to the last runner at the back of the pack.
Abbott World Marathon Majors' first ever three-part docuseries tells three of those tales from one end of the marathon spectrum to the other.
The individuals you will meet in this series have each faced challenges and tests along the way that re-affirm the belief that no medal – and especially no Six Star medal – is earned the easy way.
Each Abbott World Marathon Majors race day brings together a cast of hundreds of thousands of runners and spectators; a festival of humanity in a celebration of the spirit of endurance, perseverance and community.
Let's meet three amazing members of that community as we dive deeper into our spring 2023 Six Star Stories.
The city of Essen is steeped in its history as the industrial powerhouse of Germany.
It bears the imprint of that past in the landmarks standing as a reminder of its role as the energy-producing heartland of the country.
It's here, in his home town, where we first encounter Thomas Eller.
Thomas' goal is to become the world's first deaf-born Six Star Finisher.
As a teacher at a deaf school and athletics coach for deaf children, the 43-year-old has a keen sense of the struggles the Deaf community can face in sport as well as life in general.
He has made it his mission to show the pupils he teaches that the barriers they see in front of them as a result of their deafness can be overcome.
Thomas' own journey in the marathon began away from the Majors in the heat of the Jordanian desert, where he ran the Petra Marathon in 2018.
After discovering a talent for the 26.2-mile distance, he rattled through his first few Majors until the pandemic of 2020 interrupted his plans to complete Tokyo and Boston in quick succession.
It would be fall 2021 when he eventually collected his fifth star in Boston, leaving Tokyo standing in between Thomas and his dream.
Our cameras follow his journey to the Japanese capital, where he must rely on the support of close friends to help him navigate the many challenges presented to a Deaf person in unfamiliar surroundings.
Seeing the journey through race week from his perspective is an eye-opening experience, not just because of his disability, but also due to the wave of support he clearly has from the global network of runners who have come to know and love Thomas through his social media channels.
Finally, we will come to his attempt on race day to write history for the Deaf community worldwide.
Thomas' Six Star story is not about how he overcomes his disability; it is about how he has turned it into his superpower.
Fate can have a strange way of intervening in some of life's journeys.
Alexandria Williams was never supposed to run the Boston Marathon as the final leg of her own Six Star Journey.
In 2018, it was due to be her third star, completing the American trio of AbbottWMM races before thoughts could turn to the races outside her homeland.
The 2018 weather had other ideas. Alex didn't end her Boston race day in the glory of Boylston Street, she ended it in the back of an ambulance.
She was one of many who succumbed to the terrible conditions that day, but she endured far greater heartache with the loss of her mother in the same year.
Tough people are made of tough stuff, and Alex embodies that maxim with her determination to carry on what she had started.
2022 would be her next chance to right the wrongs of Boston, but a damaged knee hindered training, and the emotion of what Boston had come to mean to her denied her an official finish. She missed the cut-off by just a few minutes.
Re-focusing on her mission to conquer the overseas races, the latter half of 2022 sent her to Berlin and London, her first time overseas, before Tokyo was completed in March of 2022.
Boston, her unicorn, lay in wait once more, and this time, it would be her sixth.
Alex's story is about more than her dream of the Six Star medal. It's about a woman seeking her place in a world where she and many like her have often felt they don't belong.
Running, and the Six Star journey, gave her that place, and she has used it to light the way for many more members of the black running community.
Alongside her striving to complete the set, Alex's Six Star story delves into her work for the Black Unicorns organization, and lifts the lid on how she is using her position to help blaze a trail for other black women to discover the power of the marathon.
Alex sometimes describes herself as a back-of-the-packer. In terms of finish times, that may well be true.
But as far as her role in her community is concerned, she is leading the way.
The age of professional sport has often been accused of dulling the personalities behind the performances.
Media training, innate shyness and – sometimes – a focus on nothing other than the job at hand, can serve to keep the watching public from learning in any real depth about the competitors they see on screen.
None of this can be leveled at the man they call the Citizen Runner.
Yuki Kawauchi has never conformed to any stereotype of the elite athlete.
For much of his career at the top end of marathon running, he held down a job as well as fitting in his training.
While that was still enough to secure him places in the world’s premier events, it was his quirks that made him stand out, be that the half marathon he ran dressed in various animal costumes, or the race he took part in wearing a business suit.
But perhaps above all, the separator between Kawauchi and the other elite athletes was his eye-watering racing schedule.
Kawauchi holds the world record for the most marathons completed in under two hours and twenty minutes. Before arriving in London, his total stood at 104.
It was this list of weird and wonderful feats that he came armed with to the 2018 Boston Marathon. On a day when Mother Nature did her worst to decimate the race, Kawauchi stared her down.
After attacking on the front in the early miles before dropping back into the pack, it was the little man from Japan who endured the wind and rain to overhaul the world champion Geoffrey Kirui to claim a famous victory on the Abbott World Marathon Majors circuit.
It elevated him to cult hero status at home and in the wider running world, but he remained restless for his next goal, which arrived in 2023 with his first visit to London to claim his sixth and final star.
Few elites have accomplished the feat. Edna Kiplagat earned her Six Star medal in 2018 and Sara Hall followed suit in 2019.
The AbbottWMM team joined Yuki on his mission to claim his Six Star medal, hoping on the way to learn more about this entirely unique character, and to seek an answer to the question: why?
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