"I follow doctors' orders, but I do try to push the doctors," she said with a smile. "I can sometimes be hardheaded."
Her father, Craig, a former state senator, uses a different word: "Driven."
"Goal-oriented and determined," says Kareem Lanier, cofounder of TNT International Racing Club, for which Lewis runs. "She's a trouper who can suck it up."
Her athletic gifts showed early. When she was 3, Lewis began doing gymnastics. By 8, she was competing. In junior high, she was the fastest kid in school. At Neshaminy High, where she captained the indoor and outdoor girls' track teams, she sprinted, hurdled and jumped.
At Duke University, she excelled in relays, threw the javelin, specialized in the heptathlon. "I loved challenging myself in a lot of different ways," she said.
But injuries began to hamper her. She had surgery on her shins. Both knees were scoped, cleaned out through arthroscopic surgery. Her track coach wanted her to downshift. She wanted to gear up. Frustrated, she switched to diving. Senior year, she missed the NCAA diving championships by a tenth of a point.
After college, she ran three miles a day for fitness and mental health. She earned a master's in sports administration, then an M.B.A. She ran stadium steps, practiced yoga and taekwondo, climbed rocks. She worked in sports administration, athletic counseling, sports marketing. She lived in different cities and traveled widely, running on six continents. But her body continued to balk. She had an operation to bring her cranky knees into alignment.
In 1999, she ran her first 10k. The course was brutally vertical. Lewis, exhausted, loved it. In 2002, when she moved back to Philadelphia, friends urged her to try the Broad Street Run, and the Philadelphia Distance Run. She began training. The more miles she logged, the more her hips hurt. She was "living on Advil."
