Moses Lake woman runs Boston Marathon

Update: Jodi O'Shea was unharmed by the recent explosions. See here for more details.

BOSTON - A Moses Lake woman is one of the thousands of runners who took to the streets for the annual Boston Marathon Monday. Qualifying and running in the marathon fulfills a personal goal for Jodi O'Shea, and it's a way, O'Shea said, to pay tribute to family, friends and patients battling cancer.

The idea of participating in the Boston Marathon was one of those running jokes between O'Shea and her mom Charlotte Johnson when Johnson was fighting a rare form of skin cancer, O'Shea said.

"It kind of became a bucket list thing, that Mom and I would talk about," O'Shea said. It started when O'Shea, an enthusiastic runner, completed a 2009 marathon in Tri-Cities.

At the time that was going to be her one and only marathon, she said. O'Shea and her husband Christian have five children, and she is a physician's assistant at Samaritan Clinic, working three days per week.

But she was determined to run that one marathon, even in the midst of troubled times. "It was the week that my mom started chemotherapy," O'Shea said. "I told her, 'I finished my marathon when I finished, but yours is just starting.'" Marathon jokes, especially Boston Marathon jokes, became part of their conversations, a way to lighten a bad situation, like their jokes about winning the lottery, she said.

That changed when Charlotte Johnson died in December 2010. "It didn't become a joke anymore. I kind of took it as a mission," O'Shea said.

But getting to race in Boston required negotiating some bumps in the road. "You have to qualify to get into (the Boston Marathon). I had actually run my marathon one hour slower (than the qualifying time)," she said.

"So I started working at it." She trained and entered the Spokane Marathon in May 2011, but was injured during the race and had to drop out. O'Shea is also a triathlon athlete, and recovered enough to run in a triathlon in Ireland. She also participated in the 2011 Las Vegas Marathon. "I ran this race with ribbons all over me," she said.

They were "honor ribbons," worn for her mom and patients and friends battling cancer. She wore a bracelet in honor of a friend who was a cancer survivor.

That encouraged her to make another try at qualifying for Boston, and she did, running in Paris. "I got sick in the middle of the race," she said, and had to alternate running and walking to the finish. Even in those conditions it was her fastest marathon to date.

But her husband suggested she might want to think about the marathon thing, and she thought he might be right, she said. "Then I came home, and I got the itch." She ran in a marathon at Snoqualmie, and qualified. "Off to Boston I go."

O'Shea has been training all winter, starting at 30 miles a week and working up to 50 miles. It's been a juggling act, what with five kids and a job. "It is called 5 a.m. I run when everybody else is in bed," she said. "I've run all winter with a head lamp, ski gloves, you name it." She tried to train at least five days per week, she said.

She will be wearing a wristband in honor of a friend, she said, the same friend she ran in support of in Las Vegas, who is fighting a second battle with cancer. And she's wearing ribbons for some of her patients fighting the disease.

O'Shea has set a goal of running the race in three hours, 45 minutes or less, she said.

And crossing one thing off that bucket list has made her rethink some of those other goals. "I wonder if I can win the lottery," she said.