Lakewood Runner 1 of 6 Featured in NYC Marathon

Marathons and birthday cakes usually don’t go together.

But Heather Mursch will be one of six featured runners in the ING New York City Marathon on Nov. 6, the day she turns 35.

“It’s the icing on the cake,” she said. “I can’t imagine any other way to spend my birthday than to have my best friend, my sister and my husband chase me around the city.”

Mursch, a five-year Lakewood resident, has never been to the Big Apple, but she’s going to see plenty of it.

The marathon, which was named the third-best marathon in the world by the magazine “Runner’s World,” will feature more than 45,000 runners, starting in Central Park and follow a 26.2-mile course to Central Park.

“Just being able to run in the marathon is an honor,” she said.

Mursch, as a featured runner, uploads pictures and videos to ING's Runner's Nation Facebook page. The runner with the most votes on the Featured Runner Contest page at the end of this week wins VIP treatment on race day, with luxury transportation and access to the VIP tent, where the celebrities and elite runners will be hanging out.

“I love Apolo Anton Ohno, I’m praying to God I get to meet him,” she said. “I hope I win.”

It may be her first time in New York City, but Mursch is no stranger to marathons. She ran both the Pittsburgh and Cleveland marathons last year in two weeks, which led to problems with her iliotibial band, a group of muscle fibers in the thigh.

“After that, any time I would go over 13 miles, it would start to bother me,” she said.

She went through physical therapy and scaled back her schedule, which included teaching a group weight-training class at Fit Works gyms in Parma and Rocky River six days a week, coaching a running team raising money for Crohn’s disease and colitis, working full-time as a 401K administrator in Mentor and taking care of her nine-year-old son, Colin.

“There for a little while, it was just insane,” she said.

Mursch still works full-time, but she only teaches on the days she doesn’t run, and she no longer coaches.

For the Mursches, running has become a family affair. Jay just finished his first half-marathon in Columbus on Oct. 16, and Colin ran in the on Sunday in .

Mursch said she has run a total of 300 miles in nine weeks of training for this marathon, and her blog, Mile 26 and More, is to show people it’s possible to still have a life while training for a marathon.

“People get so caught up in their training, they forget it’s ok to skip a run,” she said. “It can be your life, if you let it.”

Between stretching, taking pictures and video for her blog and actually running, Mursch said a good workout usually takes about four hours.

“I always think if I was a faster runner, I would spend so much less time training,” she said.

Mursch’s husband, Jay Mursch, said his wife’s passion for running took some getting used to.

“At first, you don’t understand why they’d want to spend so much time running around,” he said.

But Jay said, after he started going to the races, he understood.

“After you experience that personal triumph, which is what it’s really all about, you totally get it,” he said.