That's all changed now. Running has dramatically changed Amy's life, and she competed in her seventh marathon this fall. Amy, 39, moved to Adrian last summer, when her husband John became conductor for the Adrian Symphony Orchestra headquartered at Adrian College. She teaches fifth grade at nearby Madison schools, but she uses much of her spare time to chase her passion for running. It's a passion that may never have developed if the cancer hadn't been removed once and for all-even though the lower half of her left leg came with it.

"The irony is I couldn't run with two legs, but I can with one," she says with a laugh.

Amy is missing another major body part, but it's not as obvious. She only has one lung. "It gets really hard for me towards the end of a race," she says. "I start to feel kind of like I'm suffocating, and that's not real comfortable. And I'm always trying to think what I can do to make the one lung super-strong, but I don't know if I can ever compensate. But that's OK; I'm still able to do it, and that's all right."

Apparently, it is. Amy started running just three years ago. Last spring, she was the first female amputee to run the Boston Marathon. This past autumn, she finished marathons in Detroit and Tucson, Ariz. and in November, she won her division in San Diego's Silver Strand Half Marathon for the second time. She won it last year, too, setting a new official half-marathon record at 46 seconds short of 2 hours.

Her current success came only after years of trouble. The tumor first started bothering her in the fifth grade. For a long time, doctors didn't know what is was, and they even put a cast on her in case it was tendonitis. "They tried everything on me," Amy says. "For a while there they thought I was psycho, too. They thought maybe I was imagining it or doing it for attention or something." Eventually, however, the real problem was discovered: Amy had a rare type of childhood cancer called an undifferentiated sarcoma. It's gone for good today, and she says her chance of getting cancer is the same good as anyone's. For years, though, she endured pain and surgeries, including a leg amputation when she was 19.

"I was always in pain; always. I didn't want to lose my leg. But it meant that that was going to be gone from my life, and that was OK with me. You do go from somebody with two legs and just kind of fitting in and being like everybody else, and then all of a sudden you're not, and that was difficult. You have people-acquaintances and friends-and they're uncomfortable around you," she says. "But I was OK with it, and I dealt with it as well as I think I could have."

However, then Amy had to brave aggressive chemotherapy treatments to try to save her lung, and it didn't work. It began to seem like everything was adding up against her.

"When it went to my lung, I was not very happy about that. Because I thought, 'You amputated my leg, you did all this other stuff, gave me all these drugs, I learned to walk again, and now.'"

To cope, she hid it as much as possible. "I really went into a kind of denial. I didn't tell anybody. I kept it very quiet and I didn't tell people I was an amputee, and I walk well enough that they didn't know." This went on for 10 years, until Amy finally found her new interest. "Running has allowed me to let all of that go."

She first started in Tennessee. "The lady I taught with was going to be the race director for a little 5K race, and I said to her, 'How neat, I would love to be able to do something like that.' And she said, 'Why don't you?'"

Amy asked herself the same question, and two short weeks later she finished the 3.1 mile event. She didn't have a fancy running leg back then, just her normal walking leg, and had to walk everything but the first mile. But she was elated that she finished and her confidence grew. "It felt so wonderful just to be able to wear shorts and be OK with it," she says. "It was so freeing."

She kept at it, and soon she got her first real running leg. Though relatively heavy at almost seven pounds, it was much more comfortable.

"That's when I got the crazy idea I was going to train for a marathon," she says. One year of training later, she ran the Disney World Marathon. "I think it took me 5 hours and 20 minutes or something, and I was scared to death, I didn't know if I was going to make it or not. But I did it, and I was just absolutely thrilled."

Leg up

These days, Amy wears a leg that weighs about three pounds, which has allowed her to shave off nearly an hour from her marathon time. Made of carbon fiber, the bottom of the leg is fitted with the front half of a Brooks running shoe sole. Amy is sponsored by Brooks, who provides her with all her equipment (which means she can't spit or cuss in public, she jokes). Like most runners, she gets new shoes every few hundred miles, and she uses the sole from the left shoe on the prosthesis.

"Good old Super Glue, just stick it on. That's not very high-tech, but it works." This sort of improvisation is not uncommon. There's not a lot of research for athlete amputees, and so when the athletes get together, they swap techniques. "Some people put tires on the bottom. Yeah, Goodyear treads! Well, at least you don't have to change them as often then," she says with a laugh.

Amy's running leg comes with challenges that people with two complete legs don't face. For one thing, it's not equipped with muscles and tendons. Although the prosthesis is designed to provide a little spring action, lugging it around still takes a lot more energy. Also, Amy runs a lot. She runs several times a week, including a 20 or 25 mile run every weekend. This year-round schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on her leg. The skin where the prosthesis is attached is tender, and therefore tears, blisters and forms lesions.

Sweating is another problem, because it makes it harder to keep the prosthesis attached. She remembers one 5K when she had to stoop over and hold the leg on for the last stretch. "I looked like Quasimodo crossing the finish line," she says. In an average marathon, she has to make several three-minute stops to peel everything off and dry it out. Amy's goal is to break the women's world record for marathons at 4 hours and 17 minutes, and since her personal record is just 14 minutes longer, every minute counts. One good, dry day could make all the difference.

To her, though, there are a lot of reasons to run that have nothing to do with winning. There is the solace, the health benefits, and the network of support in the running community. The word she keeps coming back to over and over is joy. "I run because it just brings me so much joy. It's such a fun activity for me," she says. "Just the fact that I'm able to do it is an amazing feeling."

In the process, Amy tends to inspire others. People often approach her to tell her what it's meant to them to see her run. "That's something that makes me feel really good, to think that maybe I've helped somebody decide to do something they've always wanted to try but haven't had the courage," Amy says. "It's not anything that I ever thought would happen."