Lauren Treacy, 22, runs Rehoboth marathon four years after stroke

Just four years after a stroke left now-22-year-old Lauren Treacy unable to walk, she ran her first marathon.

Treacy completed the Rehoboth Beach Seashore Marathon Dec. 8 in 3:40, maintaining an average 8:36-per-mile pace and beating her four-hour goal.

“I enjoyed every minute of it and felt so thankful that I could be a part of it,” she said. “Even when it got hard, I kept in mind everything that I’ve gone through before and what I’ve overcome.”

She’s come quite a long way since the fateful evening of Dec. 29, 2020.

She first started feeling dizzy and faint, causing her to fall over, and she initially thought it was one of her occasional migraines – until the symptoms wouldn’t go away. 

She slowly realized she couldn’t swallow, half of her face and her body felt strange, and she felt a lack of coordination.

Her dad drove her to the emergency room, her first time ever there.

Home in Great Falls, Va., for winter break during her freshman year at Penn State, she had planned to go to her family’s beach house the next day for the holiday. 

But after several scans revealed a clot in her brain, she realized that wouldn’t be possible. At 18 years old, she was having a lateral medullary stroke.

“From that moment on, [the doctors] were like, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to the beach,’” she said.

She stayed in the hospital for a month, relearning to walk and regaining the ability to swallow and perform other basic functions. 

For the first week, she was hooked up to an IV feeding tube and was completely bedridden, unable to walk by herself.

From there, she moved to the rehabilitation inpatient floor, where, over the next few weeks, she went from being in a wheelchair, to using a walker, to walking with assistance, to then being able to walk unassisted.

“I was really unsteady on my feet and had no coordination,” she recalled of the first stage of her recovery. “I felt like I was going to fall over the whole time.”

The whole process took about three weeks. Stairs were another story, adding another layer of difficulty, she said.

Prior to the stroke, she was an avid runner and athlete. 

“I remember I was in the hospital and they asked me to do a lunge, and the doctor was like, ‘That’s too hard for you.’ And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Because I would’ve been able to do a lunge easily yesterday, but then all of the sudden I couldn’t do all these things that I had assumed I’d always be able to do.”

At 18, she said, people often think they’re invincible, that nothing will happen to them.

“This made me come to terms with how fragile my own body was,” she said.

Even so, despite the setbacks and injuries she encounters from imbalances in her body, and despite her doctors discouraging her from working out and running, telling her just to be happy she’s alive and able to walk again, she has continued to push herself to achieve her dreams.

Running a marathon has been a longtime goal, she said.

“I think having a stroke made me even more set on achieving that because seeing how weak my body became, I wanted to take advantage of being able to run after feeling what it was like to not even be able to walk,” she said.

Her twin sister, Emily, had confidence in her throughout the entire recovery process. There was never a doubt in her mind that her sister would get back into running.

“She’s always worked so the stroke does not define her but is just a part of her history and what drives her to work even harder,” Emily said. “It’s incredible to see her run a marathon and to see all of her hard work pay off, but I think anyone who knows Lauren knows running a marathon was going to happen and she would absolutely kill it ... Nothing about this accomplishment is surprising.”

She didn’t let the stroke keep her from living out her freshman year of college either. She rushed a sorority and started classes on Zoom from her hospital room.

“I didn’t want to miss a semester,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss anything. So it was just that constant advocating for myself and pushing myself further … I wanted to just go back to being myself.”

Now at 22, having graduated from Penn State with a bachelor’s in marketing and having run her first marathon, she seems to have done exactly that. 

“If you want to do something, you are in control of your own life, and you can make it happen,” she said. “If you know that something is right for you, you need to push and advocate for yourself [to] get it done because everyone else can care about you, but at the end of the day, you’re the one who knows your goals.”