On Saturday, 4 April 2015, 41 year old Tuedon (Tee) Omatsola Morgan will line up with 11 000 other ultra-marathoners to participate in the Old Mutual Two Oceans Ultra Marathon in Cape Town, South Africa – also known as the world’s most beautiful marathon.
This won’t be her first time in South Africa, and it certainly won’t be her first long distance race.
For Tee’s accomplishments over the past eight years puts her in the same league as Wonder Woman.
Tee is British with Nigerian parents, and currently lives and works in Qatar with her husband and four children.
In 2007 following the birth of her youngest son, she tipped the scale at 121kg/266 pounds and wore a UK size 26. She was also struggling with her health and living with constant pain in her legs due to her excess weight.
Having previously weighed 63 kg, this was a big wakeup call for her. The result was that she vowed to change her sedentary lifestyle as well as her relationship with food.
Even though she was embarrassed by her size, she joined the gym and, later a running club, where Tee discovered the world of long distance running and found a new love, the pavement. Here, she received the “Most Determined Newcomer” Award during her first year of running. In three short years the club named her “Greatest Achiever”.
Shortly after she started running, she started dreaming about completing a marathon. And when a fellow runner laughed at the idea, Tee went ahead and proved him wrong.
By the end of that year, she was standing at the start line of the Johnson Arabia Dubai Creek Striders Half Marathon ready to make her dream come true. A mere seven weeks later in January 2012, she was back in Dubai towing the start line of the Chartered Dubai City Marathon. She finished in the very respectable time of 4:40:53.
But Tee had bigger dreams: She got the wild idea that she would become Nigeria’s “Face In April of 2012 she laced up her trainers and joined approximately 37,000 runners at the start line of this dream race and crossed the finish line with a time of 5:04.
Six months later she lined up half way around the world in Chicago with another 37,000 runners to take on the Bank of America Chicago Marathon.
In less than one year, Tee accomplished what most lifelong runners can barely dare to dream about; she had completed two of the most prestigious races in the marathon world. London and Chicago are part of the group of six races which bear the esteemed title of World Majors.
The other races are Boston, New York, Berlin and Tokyo. Since she was one third of the way to completing the whole series, it came as no surprise to anyone who knows her that her dream had grown from completing one marathon to completing the World Majors.
In February 2013 she finished the Tokyo Marathon with a personal best time of 4:20:00 which brought her even closer to her World Majors goal.
She really doesn’t like to push her body that hard because of a slight disability she carries in one of her legs, which requires a special running shoe.
It was while running the Tokyo Marathon that she met fellow runner, Abisoye Adekamnbi. They discussed the idea of running a marathon on each of the seven continents. Ultimately, they became the first Nigerians and fifth Black runners in the world to accomplish this.
Her next challenge was to tackle the Holy Grail of distance running: the Boston Marathon. This race is almost every long distance runner’s dream and for about 90% it remains a dream. Unlike its lottery-based counterparts, it is the only race in the series that is exclusively the domain of time qualifiers (even among the amateur runners) with a small amount of slots reserved for charity runners. As if by some miracle, Tee secured a slot via PHAB Kids. https://www.phabkids.co.
On April 15, 2013 – a day that was soon to become one for the history books – surrounded by 23,000 runners, she stepped up the start line in Hopkinson. Thankfully, she was able to cross the finish line before the unfortunate bombings occurred.
She was now half way to completing the World Majors.
By November 2013, with the completion of the New York City Marathon, she would accomplish this demanding feat and don a new identity as a runner, World Majors Finisher.
If it were anyone else, that would have been the pinnacle of their running career but by now we are clear that Tee is in a league of her own.
In her mind, if completing the World Majors is considered a big deal, then she wanted to go above and beyond that.
She managed to go way beyond by completing a marathon on all seven continents thereby securing a spot amongst other runners who have accomplished this outstanding achievement.
By January 2014, she had just two more continents to go, and continued to run them all!
• Dubai (Asia)
• London (Europe)
• Chicago (North America)
• Rio (South America)
• Melbourne (Australia)
• Antarctica
• Pietermaritzburg (Africa)
She officially became a World Marathon 6 Star Finisher and Seven Continent Finisher.
Tee has recently completed the Triple7Quest which you can read about on her Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/
To date, Tee has completed 2 ultra-marathons, 23 full marathons and 20 half marathons in over 20 countries.