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PITTSBURGH (AP) — Pia Crosby was four miles into her first half marathon when the big beige-bricked building appeared before her in the North Side.
She knew this building. But she had not known the course would bring her past it.
“I just looked up, and there it was,” said Crosby, 60, of Steubenville, Ohio. ” ‘Emotional’ is the wrong word — it was just deep gratitude that this is possible. The way I was treated there, the way the therapists and everyone helped me. … If you told me six years before that this was going to happen, I would never have believed it.”
Pia Crosby came to running late.
A native of Austria, she moved to America in 1974, met a boy in college, fell in love and carved out a life here that produced six children, now between the ages of 20 and 38. Through it all, she was a “jogger,” she said, putting in slow runs of a mile or two. She never pushed herself to go farther or faster.
Then in 2008, she signed up for a 5K race on the campus of Franciscan University of Steubenville.
To her amazement, she won. Crosby was the first woman to cross the finish line, with a time of 20 minutes and 44 seconds.
“I thought, ‘Oh! I’m really fast. What’s next?’ ” said Crosby, who was 52 at the time.
What was next was near-tragedy.
Crosby started training — for what, she wasn’t sure — because even if she had come to running late, she was good at it and she was hooked. So a month after her first race, she went for a six-mile run. Two-tenths of a mile from home, she entered an intersection.
A van approached.
There was a stop sign, but the van did not stop.
Crosby’s world went suddenly into slow motion.
“I remember seeing the van, waving and thinking: She’s going to stop,” Crosby recalled. “I remember somehow having the instinct of jumping over the nose of the van. Then I was flying off and landing on the ground. This was all obviously a split-second event, but even now, in my mind, it’s this extended time.”
She was flown to Allegheny General Hospital in the North Side, a big beige-bricked building visible to runners just after mile four of the Pittsburgh Marathon. She had two collapsed lungs, internal bleeding, broken ribs and multiple fractures in her hips. She spent nine days in the ICU.
“The doctors didn’t know if I would run again or even walk without a limp,” Crosby said. “I was, I would say, a mess.”
Rehab was slow. When she could move again, she did so with a walker, then crutches. In time, she graduated to therapy sessions in a pool.
More than a year after the accident, she began running again, not knowing what to expect.
It started slowly. She was merely a jogger again.
But she kept at it. And she got stronger and faster.
Not as fast as she had been. But now she ran with purpose.
“The gift of running had been given back to me,” she said. “And it became an occasion to give it back to other people.”
In 2011, she accepted an invitation to help coach the women’s cross country team at Franciscan University. In 2014, her son persuaded her to try a half marathon.
Shortly after mile four, she saw the big beige-bricked building.
She remembered the people who helped her then. She fed off the crowds of people lining the streets now, urging her on.
She finished at 1:42:14 — second in her age group.
“Running is an incredibly hard sport,” Crosby said. “Even though I experienced the exhilaration of a great race, most of the time, running is very hard work. Most races mean sweat, heart and toil. You feel like saying, ‘I can’t do this. I wish I wasn’t doing this. Why am I doing this?’ You feel like you have to stop.”
She did not stop. Not even the next year when she started too fast and hit the wall just a few miles into the race. She finished five minutes off her pace from the previous year, and every step hurt.
“But I did finish it,” Crosby said.
She finished because it’s the hard races that show runners who they are, she said, because refusing to give up when everything hurts and everything goes wrong is far more impressive than running fast.
“Life is like running,” said Crosby, who will run the 2016 Pittsburgh Half Marathon — this time hoping to win her age group. “When you’re trying to run at the threshold of what you can do, it hurts.”
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Information from: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, http://pghtrib.com