“It doesn’t get better with time,” she said. “It just changes.”
She received a large framed photograph of Ryan Shay, her husband, at the starting line of his last race, in New York nearly three years ago. He expected to make the United States Olympic marathon team that morning in Central Park. Instead, he had little more than an hour to live. She could not hang the picture for months. Eventually she did, but then she took it down. She hung it again. She took it down. She hung it again. It stayed, in the living room, facing the front door.
“I hope it reminds people how precious life can be,” she said. Her wedding band glistened on her left hand.
Shay, 28, has been portrayed in biographical shorthand as a young, grieving widow. But that is not her story, she said, and that is not her future.
A two-time N.C.A.A. champion at 10,000 meters, she has not raced since her husband’s death. But she has her sights on a race early next year, and maybe another — a big one, her first marathon — next November. Yes, Alicia Shay is running again. Not from anything, really, but toward something. She is not sure what.
“I’m ready to compete again,” she said. “I can feel it in my body. I can feel it in my stride.”
Shay grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, won her titles at Stanford, and spends much of her time running narrow trails through the pine forests surrounding this mountain town in northern Arizona.
Her mind, however, is often on New York.
He died in Manhattan on Nov. 3, 2007. Shay saw him pass the four-mile mark of the Olympic trials, the elite race held the day before that year’s marathon. She sprinted to see him at seven miles. He never made it. Ryan Shay collapsednear the Central Park Boathouse and was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital. Alicia Shay arrived just in time to witness the unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate him. An autopsy said he died of natural causes after he developed an irregular heartbeat. He was 28. He and Alicia had been married less than four months. She returned to New York a year later. It was a whirlwind of kind gestures, sympathetic hugs and well-meaning smiles.
Her next visit will be for next weekend’s marathon. She will cheer friends and family, including Doug Tumminello, her sister’s husband; and Sara Shay, Ryan’s sister. Mostly, though, she wants to recapture all the blurred memories at her own speed.
“I thought that going out there once would make it easy from then on forward,” Shay said. “But to be honest, I’m nervous and emotional about it. When I think about Central Park and the streets of New York, it makes me tremble inside.”
She added: “I just want to go and sit down on that hill where Ryan passed away. And I want to cry.”
But New York represents more than reflection. Shay wants to run marathons, as her husband did.
“If I could run the New York marathon, where Ryan and I met, where Ryan breathed his last breath, yes, that would be full circle — and sad, and incredible, and all those things,” she said. “That would be a dream. That would be an absolute dream.”
The corner house on the south side of Flagstaff where Shay moved about 18 months ago usually has a half-dozen cars parked in front. They belong to an ever-changing platoon of distance runners in training. Some stay a couple of weeks, some stay a year. They pay what they can afford. One of the runners this fall is Stephan Shay, Ryan’s younger brother.
The wood-paneled basement has a treadmill, a weight machine, a vibration platform, a massage chair, a pool table and a large television. A rack is filled with Hammer Nutrition products that Alicia Shay sells — drinks, supplements, gels, bars, canisters of powders.
An empty trash can sits on the back porch. Shay and others fill it with ice water and stand in it after workouts. It is in full view of neighbors.
“They’ll say: ‘What are you doing? Is that a hostel? Is that an Olympic training center?’ ” Shay said. “They just want to know what all the skinny people are doing running up and down the streets.”
Shay is happy to be one of them again. As Alicia Craig, she thought her career was over because of a neck injury in December 2004. Then she met Ryan, who saw her potential tortuously trapped. He found the chiropractor who fixed what the neurologists could not, with one jarring, strong-gripped maneuver.
Running again, Shay won the 20-kilometer women’s national championship in September 2007.
She has not raced since. After Ryan died, Shay tried to focus on her own bid for the Olympics. The United States track trials were in the summer of 2008.
“It was my goal, and Ryan’s dream for me,” she said. “I thought if I made the Olympic team, it would prove that I would be O.K. I wouldn’t be this crushed, broken woman.”
She paused. “It was totally irrational,” she said.
Everything came unspooled in the spring. Shay lost all energy. She would rest a couple of weeks, start training, stop. Then she strained her abdomen chasing her pug, Cody, down a steep driveway. That was it. She pulled out of a warm-up race, then the trials.
“The pug fiasco,” Shay said. “Poor Cody. It wasn’t his fault. If it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.”
She said she had adrenal fatigue, and a doctor said it could be up to two years before she felt fully healthy. She also learned that she had celiac disease and switched to a gluten-free diet, she said.
Last spring — two years later, almost exactly — she felt like her old self again.
She had bridged the gap by coaching with the Run Smart Project, where runners of any ability can get tailored, online training from former collegiate runners. “It was the start of moving forward,” she said.
Shay brought her knowledge of nutrition, which she studied at Stanford, and her racing pedigree.
“It’s kind of a two-for-one deal,” said Vince Sherry, one of Run Smart’s co-founders and a coach in Flagstaff. “She brings more to the table, I’d say, than any of us.”
Sherry and Mike Smith, an old friend of Ryan Shay’s and another Run Smart coach, said they have seen her smile more recently than ever.
“Not a mouth smile,” Smith said, “but her real smile.”
Yes, Alicia Shay is running again. She is up to 60 miles a week, and plans to ratchet up to 90 miles in the coming weeks.
“She’s hungry for it,” her sister Lisa Renee Tumminello said. “I can feel that resolve in her voice. ‘I want to race.’ That’s a big step, I think.”
No one ever knows exactly where running leads. Shay understands that better than most. But she will keep going anyway, maybe all the way back to New York.
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