Liz Healy has no illusions.
The 2025 New York City Marathon might have been her last, as much as she’d like to do many more.
Healy grew up in Bronxville as a battler.
She was the only girl on her youth soccer team. The only girl on her Little League baseball team.
At The Ursuline School, from which she graduated in 1994, she ran cross-country for Jan Mitchell, played basketball for Beth Wooters.
At Cornell, she captained the women’s rowing team.
But in this most recent NYC Marathon, her fourth straight and fifth NYC overall (she ran it in 2006), Healy wasn’t looking to place, or to hit a specific time or, as she’d done in past marathons, to even finish.
She wanted to start the race and soak in an atmosphere that’s so unique and special that she views it as medicine for body and soul.
Liz Healy’s mission in competing in the NYC Marathon
It wasn’t easy. Healy completed 12 miles, the first eight without physical assistance, then, after injuring a leg, holding on to teammates for support for a couple of miles before using crutches. Step after step, she continued to embrace what was drilled into her years ago at Ursuline — that, whenever possible, serve.
Healy’s was a mission to make a difference by issuing a message that was both warning and hope.
The 49-year-old is facing miles-long odds fighting cancer.
“I’m confronting something that’s trying to break me. (Doing the marathon) is a way of proving I’m strong,” she said.
Seemingly healthy, she was diagnosed with both colorectal cancer and kidney cancer after a February 2022 skiing accident at Mount Snow in which she broke her sacrum when hit and taken down by a novice skier.
She had half of one kidney removed, and, as far as the presence of cancer, her kidneys are no longer a problem.
But the colorectal cancer had already spread to her liver and lymph nodes. Learning she had cancer, she also learned it was Stage 4. She was told her odds of living five years were 13% and, maybe half that since she also had a second kind of cancer.
“I decided I could curl up in a ball and prepare to die or fight like hell to live,” Healy said.
What Liz Healy’s fight has looked like
Her fight has only intensified.
Despite undergoing multiple surgeries (in part, she had a third of her colon and about 20% of her liver removed in a 10-hour operation in April 2022), radiation and 70 rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, the cancer has spread to her lungs, brain, bones (spine, ribs, femur, shoulder, vertebrae).
She has suffered lung infections and broken both a rib and a vertabrae from coughing hard.
Healy, who, before knowing she had cancer, was already signed up to run the 2022 NYC Marathon for Fred’s Team, which raises money for cancer research in late marathon founder Fred Lebow’s name, raised money that year and every year since for cancer research.
“It’s amazing to see what the power of research can do,” she said.
For this year’s marathon, Healy put together a 20-member team that’s part of the overall 1,000-plus member Fred’s Team, which has raised $128 million for cancer research.
The team’s name was direct: Team Check Your Colon.
Included were three nurses from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where she was diagnosed and has received treatment since 2022. Also on the team was her husband, Jim and one of his cousins, her own cousin, a classmate from Bronxville’s St. Joseph’s Elementary School, four friends from Ursuline, four friends from Cornell, another current stage 4 colorectal cancer patient and four people who lost either a parent or spouse to cancer.
Team Check Your Colon raised nearly $180,000 for colon cancer research at Sloan Kettering, the hospital Healy credits with keeping her alive.
Healy can rattle off the statistics related to colorectal cancer and how it has quickly transformed from being a disease largely affecting men 60-plus to one that’s now claiming the lives of 20-something men and women.
She has attended two funerals for people who died from it in their 20s.
“People think they’re invincible. But it’s triathletes, marathoners, bodybuilders, young, old, fat or not. The disease is horrible and it’s killing way too many people,” Healy said.
By 2030, colorectal cancer is expected to be the No. 1 cancer killer. But little has changed in the past 25 years in how it’s medically treated, Healy said.
Healy’s goals are to get people to get tested and to advance treatment, regardless of whether that helps her or only future patients.
“There have been no major scientific advances,” Healy said. “We need to change the game.”
Healy, who long after being diagnosed, learned a cousin had the disease, had never been screened for it.
She hadn’t considered it. She was busy. She had her then-10-year-old daughter, Ella, (now 14) and two older parents (both died shortly before her diagnosis) to worry about, and she worked in management consulting at IBM.
That former life, living in Stamford, Connecticut, now might seem to belong to someone else.
Healy spends most days in a small apartment she and her husband, Jim, have been leasing near Sloan Kettering so she can have quick access to care. She receives regular treatment every two weeks.
But she has also spent 50 days hospitalized this year.
She was in the Sloan Kettering ER just days before the marathon.
“That was probably the 100th day in the last three years that (Ella) heard, ‘Your mom is in the hospital,’ ” Healy said, adding, “It can’t be easy for a kid. That kills me.”
Wants her story to help others get screened
She battles cancer and sometimes the effects of the treatments she has endured.
The past six months have been the most challenging.
Healy noted when lesions were discovered on her brain, she and Jim cried for two hours, then she sent him home with the message that the next day they’d figure out a plan of attack.
She doesn’t pretend any of this is easy.
“There are days I can’t get out of bed — days I can’t get off the couch. Days I’ve said to my husband, ‘I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.’ I allow myself highs and lows,” Healy explained.
Instead of tackling the marathon, Healy could still be an advocate from behind a computer screen, telling her story, raising funds and urging everyone to be screened. But that’s not who she is or wants to be.
Once a committed runner, she tries to walk as much as possible. To live, as many days as she can, as normally as she can.
She remembers being inspired by the stories she’d heard in high school from Mitchell — a cancer survivor — about doing a marathon.
“He planted a seed,” she said.
Healy had to do one, she’d decided, and, before cancer was on her personal radar, she did more than one, including Disney, NYC and the Marine Corps in Washington D.C.
That was as a competitive athlete.
Now, her reasons for going to the starting line are different.
“Movement is my medicine. It provides a mental health outlet for me and keeps me as strong as possible,” Healy said, noting she gets a six-month mental high after each marathon she does, considering marathons a way to replenish her “fight tank.”
News of her cancer has caused old friends and acquaintances from her Little League coaches, to classmates at St. Joseph’s, to other Bronxville resident and classmates and teammates and others from Ursuline (Wooters has cheered her at the NYC Marathon) and Cornell to reach out to her.
That has been a warm blessing.
Everyone’s part of a big team
All are in some way part of a big team — people pulling for Healy to defy odds and have many more days and many more races.
At the center of that team are close friends and her close-knit family, which includes three brothers and their families, her daughter, husband and her two “bonus daughters” from her husband’s first marriage, as well as three young grandhildren.
She laments how hard this is on her family, but knows things could have been worse.
“The guy who hit me that day (on the ski slope) saved my life,” Healy said.
“The reality is the Lord works in mysterious ways. I believe the Lord and others had plans for me,” she said, noting she believes her deceased parents may have given the wayward skier a little push into her.
When she thinks of short-term goals, she mentions making it to her 50th birthday this coming June.
Long-term, she dreams of watching Ella — a kid who has become an advocate, handing out cards with screening information — graduate in three-and-a-half years from high school.
“To me, those are currently on my radar — living to that point. My other goals are to raise awareness and advocate for new cures and treatments,” Healy said.
That work, she said, is “making lemonade out of lemons.”
“It’s a tough journey I’ve been put on,” she said. “But (raising funds and awareness) honestly gets me out of bed.”
The number of people knowing about her fight and her commitment to help others avoid what she’s going through grew, probably exponentially, after the New York Road Runners Club this year named her one of 26 (one for every mile) members of its Team Inspire. Team Inspire annually honors 26 NYC Marathon participants who embody the power of runing and whose stories that can help others.
Healy, clearly moved by her selection, equated it to being drafted by the Yankees.
“Sports teams have always been an essential part of my life and they continue to be essential in my life,” she said, referring both to members of her past athletic teams now supporting her and to Fred’s Team, Check Your Colon and Team Inspire.
“It’s an honor to be part of Team Inspire,” Healy said. “It’s a platform to communicate internationally and nationally. If one person sees that — sees my story — and it saves a life, that’s a victory. … I’m just trying to save one other family or person from going through this journey.”
As tough as some days are, Healy isn’t ready for her own journey to end.
“I have an amazing medical team and part of the reason I do (the marathon) is to show gratitude to them,” Healy said. “I don’t know if next year I’ll be able to do the race, but I’m going to fight like hell to be there.”
Nancy Haggerty covers sports for The Journal News/lohud.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Ursuline graduate Liz Healy competed in NYC Marathon to serve amid cancer fight
Reporting by Nancy Haggerty, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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