Manhasset resident Maggie Tursi, who said she has run a marathon every year for 15 years, was the women’s winner at the Suffolk County Marathon on Sunday.
Her time of 3:13:06.8 was not a personal record, but the marathon was the first that she treated like a race, she said.
“When I’ve run the marathons I’ve never felt like I was racing but because I had a chance at winning this one it was the first time I’ve ever run a marathon like a race,” Tursi said.
Tursi was an All-American runner in college, she said. She ran cross-country and track at Boston College and then completed a fifth year at the University of Wisconsin.
After graduating, she ran competitively for the New York Athletic Club and decided to commit to one marathon a year to stay in shape, Tursi said.
In late 2016 she learned she was pregnant with her third child, so to ensure she would get in her 2017 marathon, she invented her own throughout Manhasset that she ran on Jan. 1, she said.
The Suffolk County run hosted by Catholic Health Services is in honor of veterans. A section of the run included photographs and names of Suffolk County service members who died since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the run’s website.
That stretch helped Tursi regain motivation after running more than half of the race, she said.
“I was by myself and starting to get tired and I tried to look at each one of their faces,” she said. “I was so grateful for their service … it really just gave me a second wind to push through.”
Tursi created a women’s running group in Manhasset called Mot-R-Run with Aileen Barry, who qualified for the Olympic marathon trials, Tursi said.
The group trains for two 5Ks a year and also offers private coaching, she said.
“We have a great group of runners out of Manhasset,” Tursi said. “It’s mostly fun and to be social, and it just feels good to get out on a Saturday morning.”
Her own race last weekend was a bit of a last-minute operation. She didn’t train, and signed up less than two weeks before she ran it, Tursi said.
“It was getting toward the end of the year and, you know, I needed to check that box of doing my marathon, so I was surprised at how good I felt in the run,” she said. “Since I’ve done so many my body’s just able to do it.”
