Ex-Coral Gables, Hurricanes runner a marvel of perseverance in Miami Marathon
The T-shirt read “Built Ford Tough” on the front.
And on the back, it read: “But I’m Tougher.”
Alyssa Expósito still has the shirt she had made nearly two decades ago.
The one she wore not long after she was hit by an oncoming Ford F-450 truck while running in Coral Gables during her sophomore year at Coral Gables High in 2007 - an accident which nearly killed her and almost led to her having her right leg amputated.
Expósito can’t recall where she put the T-shirt.
But something Expósito hasn’t lost in the nearly two decades since is her resilience.
It’s a big reason Expósito recovered, walked again, finished high school and college with degrees from the University of Miami and Columbia University.
It’s a big reason she became a champion for literacy that brought her home as the social media manager at Books & Books in Coral Gables.
And it’s why she found her strength again and kept the belief she could still do what she loved doing since the fifth grade: Run.
Expósito, 34, will wake up Sunday morning and compete in the half marathon of the 2026 Lifetime Miami Marathon and Half Marathon.
It will be the 15th time she will compete in one of the races that are part of Miami’s premier annual running event.
“What she’s done and the business she’s in now, helping people is a tribute to the kind of person she is,” said Vinny Scavo, the Director of Athletic Training at the University of Miami who played a big part in Expósito’s recovery from the accident in high school when he was the head trainer at Coral Gables.
“She’s got a big heart and is as tough as can be.”
THE ACCIDENT
On May 7, 2007, Expósito had wrapped up her sophomore season in track and field and was eager to begin training for the next cross-country season.
“I remember nobody wanted to go run with me that day,” Expósito said. “This was the first time I ever went on a run by myself. I said (screw) it. I’m running.”
While running near Southwest 42nd Avenue and Blue Road in Coral Gables, Expósito circumvented a sidewalk where there was some construction at the time and took an alleyway. Expósito, who was 5-feet tall and weighed roughly 96 pounds at the time, turned the corner.
And that’s the last thing she remembers to this day before waking up to a frantic scene as she laid face up on the ground, surrounded by paramedics.
“They kept asking me, ‘Are you OK? Can you move your leg?’ I was like, ‘What?’” Expósito recalled during a recent interview with the Miami Herald. “All I could think was that my mom was going to be so mad at me and I left my bookbag on the track (at Gables). I couldn’t feel a single thing. I thought I was dreaming.”
Expósito’s mother, Ana Maria, who is a Senior administrative assistant for the School of Business at UM, wasn’t sure if her daughter would lose her leg.
Expósito was hit by the truck and pinned and dragged on the pavement for several feet.
She sustained severe muscle damage to her legs and suffered head trauma.
“They were like don’t move your leg or you’ll bleed a lot,” Expósito said. “I was super disoriented, my vision was blurred. They put a neckbrace on me and I remember making a scene because I’m claustrophobic. They started cutting my shoes and I was like no, they don’t make those anymore. It’s crazy what you think about in a moment like that.”
Expósito was hospitalized for 18 days and underwent three surgeries as doctors removed nearly a third of her calf muscle to replace the damaged area on her knee with a skin graft.
Expósito’s leg was saved.
But her right leg was severely scarred where the skin and muscle was torn off from the knee to her ankle on the inner side. Her knee was left slightly bent from the impact.
“I never looked at my leg until I was back home,” Expósito said. “My mom said, ‘You shed one tear and that’s it, we keep going.’ I remember it was gnarly and I felt like a snake. They said I would keep shedding skin as it healed.”
Expósito’s running future appeared to be over.
But she was alive.
“I still have pictures of what her leg looked like,” Scavo said. “She was in a very depressed state. She didn’t wanna see anybody, didn’t wanna talk to anybody. But she had a lot of people who loved her and supported her. I think that’s what gave her the strength to continue to run and continue to get better.”
THE ROAD BACK
It took time for Expósito to recover the strength to get back on her feet and just to walk again.
She worked with Scavo in an intense rehabilitation plan that entire summer and into the fall.
Expósito recalled the intense pain of six-hour days shaping her knee back into the form that would let her compete again as well as regaining her stamina.
Her sole focus was getting back to running.
“Everything was about getting back to running,” she said. “I did a lot of visualization work. I always dressed like I was going to go running. I was on crutches and just to go down the hallway to go to the bathroom, I was dead by the time I got there. I would think, ‘How am I gonna ever run a 5K again?’”
After nearly four months, Expósito made it back onto a cross-country course on Sept. 10, 2007.
“It was incredible,” Expósito said as tears formed in her eyes while she recalled that first day back. “Even though I believed I could, it was like, ‘I’m actually doing this.’ It was like Little Mermaid getting her legs.”
REALITY BIT…HARD
Expósito competed on the Cavaliers’ cross-country teams for her junior and senior seasons and graduated. She was honored for her courage by the Miami Herald with its Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Award and granted a $2,000 scholarship by the Dade Schools Athletic Foundation.
Expósito enrolled at UM and joined the cross-country team there.
But while Expósito was running again, it took her time to come to grips with a harsh truth. She would never be the same runner she was.
Her times dipped from running a 5K in 20 minutes on average to somewhere around 26-27 minutes. And doctors warned her that the wear and tear on her knee could result in the need for knee replacement surgery by age 20 if she didn’t stop running and training at the level of a Division-I athlete.
“I was mad because I was slow,” Expósito said.
But it didn’t slow down Expósito’s determination.
She decided she needed to learn how to adjust both physically and mentally.
After taking a break from running after high school, Expósito worked as an athletic trainer at UM where she eventually earned a degree in athletic training. She also worked part-time at Columbus High School, working with the school’s longtime head athletic trainer, Brother Herb Baker.
Expósito wanted to pursue performing arts medicine, though.
In New York, Expósito interned with the Radio City Rockettes in New York and then lived in Chicago for a time. Then, Expósito enrolled at Columbia where she’d earn a degree in exercise physiology at Columbia.
“It was a way to understand my body in a more intimate way, the mechanisms and ‘how do we function for real?’” Expósito said. “It made me realize so much more. That made me feel a lot closer to running again. Everything started aligning for me mentally and I felt like maybe I could do this thing, maybe not at the same capacity, but I have more tools now.”
Expósito started doing personal training in New York, teaching people injury prevention.
While she learned more and more, Expósito found a therapeutic way to get back into running.
‘THE BOOK GIRL’
Expósito always loved to read.
After earning her Master’s at Columbia, Expósito eventually made her way back to Miami by 2019.
She was working as a senior academic advisor at UM when COVID-19 hit the following year.
But the isolation that came with the pandemic gave Expósito the chance to double down on her fitness training.
But once restrictions eased, Expósito traveled for the better part of a year and became a freelance writer.
This is how she met Mitchell Kaplan, the founder and owner of Books & Books, the widely-known, independently-owned bookstore which has been a fixture in Coral Gables since 1982.
Expósito was working at the Miami Book Fair when Kaplan saw her and marveled at several tattoos she had on her arms.
“Those are beautiful,” Kaplan told her.
It was a conversation starter that would lead to a working relationship Kaplan said has been a huge success for his company, and a fulfilling endeavor for Expósito.
“Alyssa is amazingly dynamic and so focused and so interested in community-based kinds of things,” Kaplan said. “She’s a marvelous reader, and she adds so much to the work that we do.”
Kaplan hired Expósito on Nov. 11, 2022 as his store’s social media manager.
But she’s much more than that to Books & Books.
She’s since become an energetic ambassador and advocate for literacy, running Books & Books’ Literary Foundation and engaging with people in the community in multiple events around South Florida.
“It’s unbelievable. Her life is about personal growth and interacting with people in the community,” Kaplan said. “She’s a marvelous story of perseverance and how to turn something devastating into something that is sustaining.”
One of her highlights is monthly “reading parties” she hosts at the bookstore in which she invites anyone interested to bring a book of their choosing and sit and read for anywhere from 30-45 minutes in silence.
The events are free and Expósito has since expanded them to a few other sites around Miami, and is hoping to continue to broaden its scope in the future.
“It helped me in so many ways to heal my angst with Miami and it helped me get to know different communities and get to know my city more than I ever had,” said Expósito, who said she got the idea for the reading parties from seeing people in New York taking part in similar get-togethers in places like parks and subway stations.
“It inspired me to build something lasting. People don’t identify Miami as a place people read. Education is such a tool and look what it did for me.”
‘THE GIRL WHO GOT HIT BY THE TRUCK’
For a long time, Expósito struggled with being known only for being the survivor of the accident.
It never stopped her.
Expósito kept learning. She kept healing. And she kept adapting.
And on Sunday, she’ll be running again, and doing what the accident that reshaped her life couldn’t take away from her.
“Having almost lost my life so young, there are so many things I want to do with my life,” Expósito said. “I had a mother that always told me to just do it. Everyone telling me I couldn’t do this, made me say, ‘Yes I can.’”
This story was originally published January 24, 2026 at 1:42 PM.
