Bermudian Jarrett Carlington has danced in television shows such as NBC’s Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlistand the BBC’s Motherland. This year, however, one of his proudest achievements was running the BMO Vancouver Marathon.

“As a child, I would not have believed I could ever do this,” the 30-year-old Vancouver resident said.

He still remembers a race at Clearwater Middle School. He and his classmates had to run from the school to the beach and back. When the others took off, he was only able to run for ten seconds, before he started to wheeze. He had to drop out.

“I remember my first spacer was wider than my face,” he said. “Physical education was tough but I had good days and bad days.”

Back then, he had asthma attacks three or four times a year and used his inhaler daily.

“I can remember having to knock on my parents bedroom door at 3am,” he said. “I would say I can’t breath. Can you take me to the hospital? I always felt bad because my father worked for the ferries and had to be at work at 5am. We also lived at the very end of St David’s.”

His parents, Amy and Elvin Carlington, eventually invested in a portable ventilator similar to the one at the hospital, and kept a stash of emergency medications at home.

It was not until 2011 when Jarrett went to university in Canada that his health improved. He attributes this partly to a drier climate in British Columbia, Canada.

“It felt easier to breathe,” he said.

He also found new medications to better manage his asthma.

“I can’t remember the last time I had an asthma attack,” he said. “Sometimes I can go months without having to use my inhaler. I have also learnt that I don’t need to use it as soon as I have a little wheeze.”

The pandemic triggered his interest in running.

“During that time I was just at home watching Netflix and eating,” he said. “Afterwards, I was not where I wanted to be with my cardio health.”

He started running on the treadmill at the gym.

“I started during winter,” he said. “In Vancouver there is a lot of rain at this time. I did not know what gear I would need to run outdoors.”

He started by running a mile.

“Then one day I said ‘I am not leaving the gym until I have run five miles’,” he said.

Then he thought he could run even further.

A runner friend, Mitchel Niessen, convinced him to sign up to do 21km of the BMO Vancouver Marathon.

“He helped me to train,” Mr Carlington said. “He would go out running with me and he would say, ‘This is how you should be feeling right now. You should not be out of breath. If you are doing long-distance running, you really have to stretch it out and not be hitting your peak all the time.’ I really thank him.”

As the big day approached in May, Mr Carlington found that all the training and nutrition research was paying off.

“I was really settling into the course,” he said.

He ran only 15 kilometres during training because he wanted to save running the full distance for the day of the race.

“I wanted to cross the finish line feeling like I had done something I had never done before,” Mr Carlington said. “I was starting to think this might actually be possible.”

On race day, his runner friend did the full marathon, while he did a little over half of it.

“I underestimated myself by signing up to leave the starting line in the last corral but I was finishing with people two corrals in front of me,” he said. “That was a confidence boost.”

With his asthma under control, the race was very doable. However, he had a mental battle in the last five kilometres.

“There was this voice in the back of my head saying, ‘You know what would be great, if you had an asthma attack right now’. That voice was saying, ‘you can’t do this. Everything is going to go wrong. This is too good to be true.’ ”

He had to really talk himself through the doubt to keep his focus. He got an extra push at the end from his girlfriend, Amazyles Mello-Silva. They are both fans of Hamilton the Musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton.

“She made Hamilton-themed signs,” Mr Carlington said. “She put my head on a cut-out of Alexander Hamilton’s body. I saw that I was coming to the finish line. It gave me a really big boost of encouragement and I picked up my pace again.”

He hoped to do the half marathon in under two hours and 20 minutes, which he did with a time of 2hr 4min 53sec. Not only did he meet his time goals, he also proved he had beaten asthma.

Now he is planning to do the full marathon in Vancouver in May.

In the meantime, he is busy with auditions. Things were quiet for him during the recent screen writers strikes. He and his friends used the time to make their own short films.

“We got into a film festival called S**** and Gigs,” he said. “We got into the final screening, but did not make the top three. Our film was an R-rated musical called A Chorus S***.”

Now that the writers strike is over he is taking part in a steady stream of auditions again.

“I had a project that came out recently called Monster High 2,” he said. “It is a Nickelodeon movie based on a line of children’s toys. I am featured as a dancer in the opening dance number.”