The entire school sent this gym teacher off right for the NYC Marathon

Just days before gym teacher Sam Anderson traveled from his Minnesota home to run in the 2023 New York City Marathon, his students at Westview Elementary School sent him off with the best farewell.

On Nov. 1, four days before the marathon took place, Anderson shared a video on X that has since been viewed nearly 220K times. In it, he is seen running down a crowded hallway lined with faculty and students cheering him on.

“Got called into the hallway while teaching my last class today. Turns out the whole school was waiting to send me off to the @nycmarathon,” he captioned the tweet of his video.

“That moment was just so special,” he tells TODAY.com. “Sometimes marathoning is lonely or almost a little selfish and you’re so focused on your running and you don’t get to share with too many people. So to have them acknowledge the fact that I was training hard and was running this race was a pretty special moment that I’ll never forget for sure.”

Although the teacher did have to clarify that the race down the hallway wasn't the race.

“Some of the younger students thought that (the hallway rally) was the start of my race and that I was actually running to New York,” he recalls while remembering how surprised they were to see him at the end of the school day still in the building. “They were like ‘Mr. Anderson... why are you here? I thought you were running to New York.”

Anderson says the cheerful send-off came in handy as he hazily ran mile 20 of the 26.2-mile route that winds through the city’s five boroughs.

By that point, the teacher says he felt the weight of his legs beneath him and the raggedness of his breathing as his lungs and quads burned.

“You basically need anything to get you through,” the 29-year-old says.

Anderson recalls how he forced one foot in front of the other while bringing to mind the blur of thumbs-up, cheers, high-fives and hugs he received from the students and staff.

“I kept thinking to myself, you know, that my students knew I was running. They’re excited that I was there, and they were excited to hear about how it went afterward,” he says.

“I kept thinking about them and saying, ‘Hey, you have to get to the finish line so that you can tell them about it on Monday.’”

Fortunately, when Anderson returned to school, he was able to report that he ran the marathon in an impressive two hours and 44 minutes.

He placed 251 out of the 51,402 total runners that were reported by the New York Road Runners to have finished.

“So many students have been like, ‘Hey, did you win, did you win?’” he says of returning back to his students. “I tried to explain, you know, no, it’s the biggest marathon in the world.”

He might not have won the marathon, but Anderson hopes his experience will be successful in inspiring his students to achieve their own big goals in the future.

“The goal would be, I hope, that I can inspire students to maybe someday do their own marathon,” he says. “Or at least set a goal like I did and just work really hard towards that.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com