Ruston’s Running Man

David Saleh laughs at the idea after he says it out loud.

The 46-year-old Ruston native has fallen in love with long-distance running over the past six years and will check another milestone off his list at the 2023 Boston Marathon Monday – his third marathon within three years.

He enjoys the work and the admittingly grueling process it takes to even get on Monday’s international stage.

But the Boston Marathon is by no means a final chapter or the peak of this runner’s journey like it might be for others. Not even close, and it’s exactly the reason he chuckles as he shares his plans.

“I don’t know if I got hit in the head too many times or what, but I decided I wanted to chase the idea of completing the World Major Six,” Saleh said.

The World Major Six is what’s called the Abbott World Marathon Majors, the six biggest marathons in the world: New York City, Chicago, Berlin, London, Boston, and Tokyo.

Saleh wants to run in them all.

And after Monday, he’ll only need to run in Tokyo to complete his goal.

He ran the New York Marathon in 2017 as the first leg of the worldwide mission and followed it up with the Chicago Marathon in 2018, Berlin in 2019, London in 2021 and a return to New York in 2022 for a half marathon.

But he didn’t begin running to pursue such grand dreams at first. When he first picked up the hobby, it was meant as weight loss.

“I ran my first half marathon in 2015 and I thought at 13 miles, that’s a long distance, I’m done,” Saleh said. “ I thought that was cool and then I found out everyone and their mother’s done a half marathon, so I decided to do another.”

He went to New York in 2017 to say he ran in one of the big ones, but a casual walk through the race expo turned out to be the spark to so much more.

“I was in New York getting ready and walking into it, I was going to be one and done and call it a day and say I had done it,” Saleh said. “I was walking through the expo of the race and there was a booth that put on the Six Worlds, and I started reading up on it and that’s when I was first heard about it.”

Saleh began to train like he never had before, unafraid of the work in front of him and the discipline it would take to get where he wanted.

But he didn’t do it alone.

To gain entry to New York and all the rest of the highly coveted World Six races, Saleh partnered with Team WillPower to help raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital while also giving Saleh the ability to compete.

If Saleh could raise a certain amount of money for Team Will-Power’s work, he would get his bid to each race. For New York the goal was $5,000. Boston was $10,000.

Saleh was able to raise it all.

“It’s allowed me to not only do something I enjoy but also to give back to an organization as awesome as St. Jude,” Saleh said.

But he could have just as easily called it quits and not made it back to New York, let alone Monday in Boston, after a close-call accident in late 2022.

As he trained for the NYC half marathon, Saleh was on a morning run before an outof- control car hit him on the side of the road, resulting in six broken ribs and a punctured lung – six weeks before the race.

He went to the emergency room and was surrounded by family – with a pointed question, and answer, still fresh in his mind today.

“The doctor came in and asked me if I had any questions and I remember I looked at him, dead serious, and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this race in six weeks. Can I run in it?’” Saleh said. “And I remember everyone in the room — it was the doctor, the nurse, my wife — and they were all just looking at me like, ‘did he really ask that?’” Saleh admits he had thoughts of not competing in New York later in the year, but after four weeks pf physical therapy he went and was able to run.

Thanks to his second wind, he’s got no plans of stopping for a while.

“The big thing that appeals to me with all this is that it takes a lot of discipline to keep going,” Saleh said.