Growing up, Danish Hussain Yar watched clips of the NYC Marathon: 'Running saved my life'

Five years ago, the world changed for Danish Hussain Yar -- and every other girl and woman in Afghanistan.

Hussain Yar was born in 2004, three years after an international coalition, led by American forces, overthrew the Taliban-controlled government that had sheltered the terrorists who carried out the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Growing up in the northern desert city of Mazar-i-Sharif near the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, she only knew an Afghanistan where she could attend school.

She rode her bicycle in the early hours before class, when there would be fewer men who might threaten her for being outside without a male accompanying her, and exercised in a way girls and women never could under Taliban rule.

Riding her bicycle was a safer substitute for what she really wanted to do, which was to run. But running was too complicated. What would she wear in a country where women were expected to cover themselves? And the streets could be crowded. Men would glare, or stop her, or might even attack her, she feared.

On her bicycle, she could at least speed up and pass quickly.

But she believed the whole time that, one day, she would run those big races she watched clips of online, and train like the running influencers she had become obsessed with.

Then, in 2021, U.S. forces left the country, the Taliban regained power and Hussain Yar couldn't do much of anything anymore. She barely left her house for the next year. She considers herself lucky, though. Her home had wifi, so she could keep watching those videos of people running. She even watched the 2021 New York City Marathon.

"That's why I really like running -- because it really saved my life, it really gave me that hope that, one day, I'm able to be able to run free," Hussain Yar said during a recent interview.

For Hussain Yar, now 22 and a junior at Cornell University, that day occurred a little more than two years ago, when she arrived in upstate New York and, for the first time in her life, went for a run outside in a lakeside park without a whit of concern for her safety.

On Sunday, she will join nearly 60,000 runners and take part in that marathon she watched clips of five years ago.

"This is my story, although it will inspire so many women and girls, not just Afghan people but women and girls in conflict affected zones," she said.

For Hussain Yar, her case for asylum in the U.S. is pending. Her parents remain in Afghanistan. Her older sister, Yalda, escaped with her in 2022. Two younger sisters recently fled to the UK. None of them know when they will see their parents again.

"Growing up, I was pretty sporty," said Hussain Yar.

She roller skated as a little girl. At 12, she got her first bicycle and began those early morning rides, sometimes at 5 a.m. At school, she had 30 minutes a day for exercise. Most girls would simply use it as break time.

At 14, people from the non-profit organization Free to Run came to her high school and introduced their yoga and running programs to the students. She was in 8th grade, so could not join their programs, but Yalda joined the yoga classes and told her sister about running as a form of sport.

But when the Taliban regained power, any sort of outdoor exertion for women became impossible. Escaping her homeland became her top priority. She was 17, an 11th grader who wanted to go as far as her education would take her. Staying in a country where women and girls were now barred from secondary and higher education was not an option.

She was able to connect with the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, which was offering scholarships to girls and women from Afghanistan. She and her older sister applied and were accepted, but it took another year to get passports.

Now, most women in Afghanistan are not allowed to move freely in public without a male guardian, or a mahram, a close male relative. By March 2022, women were banned from traveling on airplanes without a male chaperone, but Hussain Yar said she and her sister managed to leave the country before the ban was strictly enforced.

Afghan officials, said Hussain Yar, had learned of girls leaving the country to attend school in Bangladesh, so they carried only an airline ticket for Pakistan. In Kabul, at the international airport, she said they watched three girls ahead of them get interrogated by the border guards, who figured out they were leaving the country to seek an education, and saw them get sent home.

Sweating with nerves as she approached the guards, Hussain Yar and her sister said they were visiting relatives in Pakistan. The guards let them pass.

From Pakistan they flew to Dubai, then boarded a plane to Bangladesh. On August 11, 2022, 49 weeks after U.S. forces left Kabul, Hussain Yar arrived in Chattogram, a port city of 5 million.

The university consisted of two buildings. It was hardly ideal. She and the other students from Afghanistan were essentially refugees. Hussain Yar said she lived in a small kitchen that barely had room for a single bed. But she did everything on that bed: sleep, eat, study.

Crucially, the school also had a small gym -- with a treadmill. She had never been in a gym before. There, wearing flat walking sneakers, she went on her first run.

A year later, she tapped out her early decision application to Cornell because she liked its public health program. She was accepted with full financial aid, as was her sister. But they still needed to figure out how to get the money to travel from Bangladesh to Ithaca. They also needed a visa.

After securing funding from the Afghan Girls Financial Assistance Funds (AGFAF), an organization that provides financial and mentoring support to girls from Afghanistan, Hussain Yar and her sister travelled to Pakistan to apply for a U.S. visa, where the wait was far shorter than at the U.S. embassy in Bangladesh, she said. It took two months, but in July 2024 they arrived in Ithaca.

Shortly after she arrived, Hussain Yar laced up those flat, lightweight sneakers, headed to Cass Park, at the south end of Cayuga Lake, and went for the first outdoor run of her life. She felt the air on her face and the grass and pavement beneath her feet.

In August, when her academic classes began, she saw that Cornell offered classes in running and swimming and signed up. Her mother loved to swim, or, rather, she had loved it the one time she had done it, in a river back home.

An elderly couple in Ithaca who befriended her shortly after she had arrived saw how much she loved running and bought her a proper pair of running trainers. Hussain Yar tried to get fast enough to make the track team. She couldn't get there, but no matter. In June 2025, she ran the 13.1-mile Gorges Half Marathon. She'd never before run longer than eight miles.

Through a mentor, she connected with Alex Kleinerman, a local running coach who works with everyday runners. Kleinerman showed her how to track her workouts, her distance, her pace, the weather, how she felt physically during the run and any stress.

Now comes New York, the long race through the city, and everything that goes with it. She knows a little about it. Last year, she took a bus down from Cornell and handed out water with a group of volunteers in Brooklyn.

She has finished two 20-mile training runs and believes she's ready. A dream that used to feel like "one day" has become "Sunday".

There are fewer than 10 runners from Afghanistan who will race this weekend. Each of them has a story.

"I am so nervous and excited and they're the same thing, you know?" she said.

And she feels something else, too -- free.