"We love Jenny. Who doesn’t love Jenny?" two-time Marla Runyan told us earlier this year, speaking about Jenny Crain, a popular, gregarious, and effervescent presence in American distance running for more than a decade. Crain qualified for four Olympic Marathon Trials and two more on the track, set her personal best of 2:37:06 at the 2004 Trials, and also forged a successful business career as an insurance company consultant. As almost all of our readers know by now, on August 21 in Milwaukee, Crain was struck by a car while on a training run. Her injuries were devastating; she had a broken cervical vertebra (which has been surgically fused) and a broken jaw and nose, but most significantly, Crain suffered massive brain trauma and was sedated and put into an "induced sleep" for over a month to let healing proceed. She was on a ventilator and had a feeding tube inserted, and there was a shunt in her head to alleviate cranial pressure. She had bleeding on the brain and was in a coma for a month. "It was touch and go," recalls her brother Peter Crain, who visits her weekly from Minneapolis. "They didn’t think she was going to come out of it at all" and might be in vegetative state. "But they did say there is a chance she’d turn it around," he notes, and Crain’s mother Donna told Runyan "she’s come back to us." In February, Peter Crain observed "every week I make that trip to Milwaukee, there’s this huge improvement."