When Kelly Herron took a quick bathroom break during her jog last week, she was attacked by a man hiding in one of the stalls — and used her self-defense skills to successfully fight him off.
"He immediately took me down to the ground, hit both my knees and legs, and then it was a fight on the bathroom floor and I just kept screaming, ‘Not today, motherfucker!'" she recounted to ABC.
Herron was able to employ self-defense tactics to fend off the attacker, and her fitness tracker caught the exact moment everything went down.
"My biggest running nightmare became reality," she wrote on an Instagram post about the incident. "4 miles into my long run Sunday afternoon, I stopped to use the restroom and was assaulted by a man hiding in a stall (that is my GPS in red lines)."
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She also recalled that with help from a passerby, she was able to fend him off and lock him in the bathroom and call police.
"I was able to lock him in the bathroom until police arrived," continued. "Thankfully I just took a self-defense class offered at my work and utilized all of it. My face is stitched, my body is bruised, but my spirit is intact."
"All those little things that I learned in my life ... how to punch and everything came back to me," she told ABC. "I started to feel like I was going to lose consciousness ... but I got another surge of adrenaline, and I reached for the door and was able to get out."
ABC reports that Herron's attacker was identified as Gary Steiner, a 40-year-old registered sex offender in Arizona. Steiner will now face charges of second degree assault and attempted rape, and is being held on $750,000 bail.
Not today, indeed.
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