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Benjamin Andrus dug his spikes into the track at Franklin Field, preparing to run a mile against the best runners in the country.
It was the Penn Relays in Philadelphia, one of the most important races of his career. But Andrus wasn’t sure he wanted to run in it. He’d been through so much already. The tragedy he barely survived. The sorrow he couldn’t avoid.
His focus was waning seconds before the starting gun popped. Then, his gaze caught the inscription on his right cleat. It was a date, 4/14/26, that he’d drawn on the pink sole of his shoe a few days earlier with a black marker. A heart was sketched next to it.
On his left shoe, there was another heart and two words: For Dad.
Ten days earlier, Andrus, a senior runner at Haddonfield High School, lost his father, Jeffrey, after a seven-year battle with brain cancer. Jeffrey was 51. This was Andrus’ first race without his father, who attended as many meets as he could, even as he became confined to a wheelchair and lost most of his vision. Jeffrey loved to watch his son run.
Andrus knew his father would have wanted him to compete at the Penn Relays, a historic track event that has featured runners from across the world since 1895. Andrus had to compete on April 24, but if he was going to run, he wanted to honor Jeffrey’s memory.
“The whole point of the message was to always carry him with me,” said Andrus. ”A lot of people wear cross chains to carry Jesus with them. It’s kind of like that. If I’m always stepping with him, I’ll be reminded before a race why I’m doing it, and it’ll make me run with emotion.”
Andrus crossed the finish line that day with a time of 4:16.84 — a personal record — and earned a medal with a fifth-place finish.
“Running with a heavy heart is just different,” said Andrus.
His choice of words seemed deliberate, considering Andrus himself nearly died nine months earlier from a cardiac blockage. He’d been rushed to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), only a six-minute walk from Franklin Field. His return to Philadelphia was supposed to be a celebration of how far he’d come.
The mood changed after Andrus said goodbye to his father for the last time. It was now bittersweet. When Andrus toed the line, he looked down at his shoes and was reminded of something Jeffrey said during cancer treatments: “It’s going to get better.”
That sentiment carried him through the race that day and the rest of his senior season.
“This school year has probably been the hardest of my life,” Andrus said. “But, honestly, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Going through tough times makes you stronger. I know my mom’s proud, my family’s proud, and I’m sure my dad is proud too.”
‘We almost lost him’
Andrus couldn’t keep his eyes open.
He was lying in the emergency room at CHOP in Philadelphia days after the Fourth of July 2025, with his mother, Alison, by his side. The hospital staff checked Andrus’ resting heart rate, and when the number appeared on the monitor, the looks on their faces made Andrus anxious.
The typical resting heart rate for a 16-year-old ranges between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
He was at 38, and in danger.
Andrus, a Boston College track commit, had no history of heart problems, nor did his family. He went into the summer in peak shape after a junior year in which he won a state title, medaled at the track Meet of Champions and earned All-America honors at New Balance Nationals.
But training runs had been tough since he returned from a family vacation. His GPS smartwatch displayed readings of a low heart rate. Andrus was also experiencing headaches.
Haddonfield cross country coach Matt Cieslik insisted that Andrus get checked out.
Andrus underwent tests at the CHOP Specialty Care & Surgery Center in nearby Voorhees. The teenager was initially told that he’d be done in an hour and have the results in three days. Those instructions changed quickly. Andrus was soon on the way to the emergency room.
A specialized response team was waiting for Andrus, who was surrounded by doctors concerned about his blood pressure and his resting heart rate as it dropped down even lower to 29. Andrus’ heartbeat was disrupted as he suffered a complete heart block.
Doctors inserted a pacemaker through a vein in Andrus’ neck to monitor his heart rate and send electrical impulses to keep his heart beating steadily while he was in the Intensive Care Unit. They also started an IV, administered doxycycline, an antibiotic used to treat Lyme disease, and told his mother they were glad Andrus had been rushed to the hospital.
Alison said doctors told her that Andrus could have died within minutes without treatment.
“The doctor was yelling like a TV show,” Alison said. “He was directing everybody, saying, ‘This is Ben Andrus. He’s a 16-year-old male distance runner, male, who’s been having plenty of headaches and fatigue. The EKG shows this,’ and so on. Everyone was just swarming him.”
Andrus was bedridden after the pacemaker was attached. He couldn’t stretch or walk, and he definitely couldn’t run. Andrus was stuck, and bored.
Texts and calls flooded his phone when the news spread of what happened. Two of Andrus’ best friends on the cross country and track team — Peter Simpson and Ryan Gibson — visited him two days after his surgery. They cracked jokes for three hours and avoided the topic of running.
“We were just happy to see him and know that he was okay,” Simpson said. “We love Ben and it was pretty scary to see that we almost lost him.”
Five days after Andrus walked into CHOP, he was given his diagnosis.
Andrus had Lyme carditis, brought on after a tick bite when bacteria from Lyme disease enters the heart tissue. It causes irregular heartbeats, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and eventually a complete heart block. The good news? It was curable.
Doctors administered oral antibiotics for two days before discharging Andrus. On his way out of the hospital, he asked the questions that had been on the top of his mind since he arrived.
“I thought my running career was completely over,” Andrus said. “I maybe asked them 30 times in the hospital after they gave me the diagnosis, ‘Will I be able to run again? How’s this going to affect my cardiovascular system? Am I going to be able to compete?’”
Return to running
Doctors detached the temporary pacemaker from Andrus’ neck before he left the hospital and fastened a heart monitor patch to his chest to monitor him.
He was cleared to do low-intensity workouts, but doctors made it clear they did not want him going on runs that would strain his heart. Andrus listened. For 24 hours.
The teenager started slowly, going on a six-mile walk with friends after being discharged. A day later, Andrus struggled through a three-mile run around his neighborhood. His team had a scheduled workout the day after. Andrus was supposed to take it easy. He ran seven miles.
“Two days earlier, he was sitting in the ICU and he wasn’t even allowed to give himself a shower,” Simpson said. “It was pretty impressive of him to bounce back that quick.”
In early August, after a month of modified workouts, Andrus was easily dropping the runners in his training group. He wasn’t at full strength, but he was now back to training with the faster runners on the cross country team — Simpson, Gibson and senior Luke Andersen.
“When he returned to training, I was kind of trying to get him to make sure that his ambition wasn’t exceeding what the doctors were allowing,” said Cieslik, his coach. “By the time we went to camp in mid-August, he was back. It was like he hadn’t missed a beat.”
Andrus wasn’t satisfied with his progress, though.
He was supposed to be the lead runner for a team that had hopes of winning a state championship. Andrus wanted to reach the podium at the Meet of Champions and qualify for Nike Cross Nationals in December for the first time in Haddonfield’s program history.
Andrus was worried it was all slipping away.
When he committed to Boston College, Andrus didn’t tell his college coaches about his near-death experience, fearing that they’d think they wasted a scholarship on him.
“There were so many late nights where I was overthinking, talking to ChatGPT and typing prompts like, ‘Is Lyme carditis even curable? Am I ever going to run fast again?’” Andrus said. “I had a lot of doubts about myself.”
Andrus’ older brother, George — a runner at Villanova — helped keep things in perspective, reminding Andrus what he went through over the summer and how far he’d come in such a short time. Andrus was also grounded by his father’s battle with cancer.
Andrus continued to put in the work, running about 75 miles a week to regain his fitness level. Andrus’ times continued to improve as he helped Haddonfield win a Colonial Conference title and a Group 2 championship. At the Meet of Champions, Andrus was Haddonfield’s No. 1 runner, finishing sixth overall in New Jersey with a time of 15:43.
“That moment meant so much to me, crossing the finish line and seeing the support from my teammates and my family,” Andrus said. “I was getting hugs from parents I barely even knew.”
Haddonfield qualified for Nike Cross Nationals after placing second at regionals. Andrus was the team’s top runner again and finished 18th out of 274 runners to lead Haddonfield to a Top 10 finish at nationals. It was the best result in state history for a New Jersey public school.
“By the end of the season, you would not have known that Ben had Lyme carditis,” Simpson said. “Anything life throws at him, he just pushes to the side and keeps pounding through.”
Andrus was a state medalist during winter track, finishing in the top eight in the 1600 (4:17.89) and 3200 (9:38.37). He helped Haddonfield repeat as the Group 2 indoor state champion. Andrus felt like himself heading into the spring.
Then, his world was turned upside down again.
His father was entering hospice.
Celebration of life
Andrus walked into Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia on April 12, 2026, two days before Jeffrey died, to say his final goodbye.
Jeffrey was unresponsive, but Andrus was sure his father could hear him.
He leaned in and told Jeffrey he loved him and that he’d make him proud. In that moment, Andrus tried to find comfort in Jeffrey’s advice: “It’s going to get better.” But it was hard to believe.
There was an image that soothed Andrus as he left his father’s bedside that day. It was the memory of Jeffrey’s smile, a grin he displayed despite all of his health struggles.
As Jeffrey’s condition worsened, he made it a point to still go out and watch his sons run. Andrus’ grandparents, John and Penny, pushed Jeffrey in his wheelchair and positioned him near the fence around the track so he could have a front-row view. They told Andrus that his father, no matter what his suffering, always cracked a smile.
Jeffrey was first diagnosed with brain cancer in 2019. Doctors told him he had a year to live. The father of three refused to accept that. He underwent chemotherapy for two years, doing anything he could to fight the disease. Along with chemo, doctors performed a stem cell transplant with the hope of treating his brain tumor. It worked. Jeffrey was declared cancer‑free.
But the procedure, and years of chemo treatments, left him with serious brain damage.
Jeffrey remained at home for another year, but he lost the ability to walk, his vision faded and his memory deteriorated. It eventually became too much for his family to handle. Jeffrey moved into an assisted living facility in Cherry Hill in 2022. He was soon back in the hospital.
A few weeks before Jeffrey’s death, he was hospitalized for a final time with acute liver and kidney failure. His family did not want to have Jeffrey go through any more surgeries and made the decision to put the 51-year-old into hospice care.
“It was this up-and-down roller coaster of panic, wondering if chemotherapy or a procedure is going to work or not,” Alison said. “It was really tough for all of my children.”
Andrus was scheduled to leave for Haddonfield’s senior trip to Disney three days after his father’s death and run in the Penn Relays when he returned from Orlando. None of it felt right, but Alison insisted that Jeffrey would have wanted Andrus to go out and live his life.
“There was a moment where I realized my body might be tired and my mentality might be a little cooked from everything going on,” Andrus said. “But (my dad) would be so disappointed in me if I were defeated by this. He’d be disappointed if I didn’t go out and honor him.”
A week after Penn Relays, Andrus was surrounded by family and friends on May 1 as they celebrated happier memories. Jeffrey insisted that, when he was gone, his family reminisce about the good times and the life he lived. He didn’t want them to mourn him.
“It’s all about choosing the right perspective that will make you happiest because that’s what he would have done,” said Andrus, who admired his father’s natural charisma and ability to bring out the best in people. “The message that we were trying to spread with the celebration of life is that he was a warrior and made every single person around him feel better.”
Andrus did not speak at his father’s celebration of life. It was too painful. He cried as family and friends shared their favorite stories about Jeffrey. Andrus embraced everyone who came to show support. That included his teammates at Haddonfield and Sean McCafferty, the head coach for Christian Brothers Academy’s nationally-renowned cross country program.
McCafferty remembered when Andrus attended the funeral of Alex Kemp, a former CBA distance runner who died in a skiing accident in January 2025. McCafferty wanted to show up for Andrus and let him know the New Jersey running world would always be there for him.
“I can’t imagine going through that as a kid,” McCafferty said.
Final finish
Andrus was shocked when he saw the qualifying times listed for the 2026 Meet of Champions.
A day earlier, Haddonfield won its first outdoor track and field Group 2 championship since 2015 and Andrus placed fourth in the 1600-meter run. He thought he’d done enough to land in the top heat as the best runners in New Jersey. He came up a few seconds short.
Andrus was placed in an unseeded heat at the state finals, a disappointing result.
He arrived at Pennsauken High School on June 3 with a feeling similar to the one he had at the Penn Relays in April. The inscriptions on the pink soles of his spikes snapped him out of that funk when he stepped on the track at the Meet of Champions.
Andrus trailed for most of the race, but with 80 meters left he was shoulder to shoulder with the lead runner. When he hit the final straightaway, he pulled in front with one last kick and crossed the finish line at 4:14.11. It was the second-fastest time he’d ever run in that event.
“If you go out and give it 100 percent, that’s exactly what my dad would be looking for,” Andrus said. “Don’t phone it in. My dad would be pretty disappointed if I let that beat me up. I didn’t, and I feel like that’s more honorable than any time or place ever will be.”
When the final times from the seeded heat were posted, Andrus was stunned again.
He finished with a better mark than one of the runners in the top heat, placing himself among the top eight in the 1600 and earning a spot on the podium in his final high school race.
Andrus cracked a smile as he draped his medal around his neck. When he left the podium and grabbed his stuff to head home, he scooped up his spikes and looked at the two-word message once more.
For Dad.
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