For North Hills alum Margo Malone, personal loss inspired 'an easy 26 miles' en route to Pittsburgh Marathon win

For even the most competitive marathoners, some runs are far more challenging than others. Oftentimes it’s not the races. It’s the training.

North Hills graduate Margo Malone can speak to that. A cross-country runner at Syracuse University from 2012-16, Malone remembers the early wake-up calls and brutal cold of the Central New York campus.

“Oh my gosh. In the winter? We would do double runs,” Malone recalled with a sigh. “The early runs would be in the morning. Our main practice was at 3:30 in the afternoon. We would hit the snow in the morning. Those were tough.”

By comparison, the 29-year-old’s victorious jaunt through the Pittsburgh Marathon’s challenging course and difficult field of competition didn’t seem to bother her much. Her first appearance in her first full hometown marathon Sunday yielded a ribbon-breaking first-place time of 2 hours, 41 minutes, 56 seconds.

North Hills grad Margo Malone wins the women's full marathon in a time of 2:41.56.@TribSports @PGHMarathon pic.twitter.com/dtDQ8C0Hhe

— Michael Love (@Mlove_Trib) May 7, 2023

“I feel like I stayed pretty conservative just because of how challenging the course was,” Malone said. “I tried to stay within myself the whole time. I was happy with the time.”

Given the two years of circumstances that led up to the race, “staying within herself” is a lot easier to describe after crossing the finish line than it was to do in the moment.

Distance running is often viewed as the ultimate individual sport. You against the rest of the field. You against the clock. You against your own pain and fatigue.

On Sunday, though, Malone wasn’t running alone. She had many others pulling her along. And the memory of one person, in particular, pushing her forward.

The same person who will be pushing her forward for the rest of her career.

A career that doesn’t involve running. But it’s a bigger race with a bigger goal.

Winding route home

Sunday’s Pittsburgh Marathon victory wasn’t Malone’s first major distance race debut. Upon graduating from Syracuse, Malone decided to try her hand at running professionally.

She moved to Boston to join an Adidas team. After two years in Massachusetts, Malone ventured out to Mammoth Lakes, Calif., and ran for the Mammoth Track Club. Not long thereafter, she won her debut marathon in Zurich, Switzerland, by four minutes and qualified for the Olympic Trials in advance of the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.

That’s when her running career ceased to be in a straight line.

A few weeks after the win in Zurich, Malone found out her mother, Midge, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. So Malone returned to Pittsburgh, hoping it would be a brief visit to support her mother through the early stages of her road to recovery. After all, her mother kept up with regular screenings. And aside from fatigue and lost time on her own runs, Midge showed no signs of illness.

Again, the course changed.

“We found out that it was Stage IV cancer,” Malone said. “She was pretty healthy otherwise. … For a long time, we believed that she would make it. I wasn’t planning on staying in Pittsburgh. But as it got more serious, my sister (Mary) and I rented a house in Lawrenceville. I met my husband (Jamie). So we figured out a life in Pittsburgh.”

Madeline “Midge” Malone succumbed to her battle with cancer in February 2021. For Margo, she didn’t just lose her mother. She lost her first coach. The woman that got her to run her first mile race while she was at St. Teresa (of Avila) in the fourth grade.

“She developed an amazing team at St. Teresa’s. A huge community of runners that still keep in touch, and she inspired a lot of them to keep running,” Malone recalled. “It was a really fun time. She was more focused on the fun than the fast times. So that was a great way to get started.”

A marathon of a different kind

In marathon running, you can’t finish the race after the first 26 miles. You need to finish the last 0.2.

But you can’t run the last 26 miles without getting the first 0.2 under your belt, either.

As much as distance running is about endurance and determination to finish a race, it’s also about motivation and a willingness to start.

Some encouragement or help from somebody else may not hurt either.

The same can be said about the fight against cancer. Curing the disease in all of its forms has proven to be a marathon for the medical community for centuries, claiming millions of victims annually along the way. One of them was Midge Malone, which is why her daughter is now as committed to her job as she is.

Margo is a senior analyst with UPMC Enterprises. That’s the venture capital arm of UPMC. Their job is to invest in early-stage healthcare companies, many of which are focused on life sciences that make inroads in the battle against cancer and other illnesses.

“To be able to see what these researchers are working on and the treatments they are developing, it’s inspiring to think about her experience,” Malone said of her mother’s battle.

The love for running that Midge gave Margo, she now takes to her job every day.

“I think there’s a lot of parallels to running,” Malone said. “These researchers have so much passion, similar to athletes and teams that are working to pursue a big goal. I like to see that same personality. If we’re investing in a researcher or even a CEO of a startup or life science company and having that passion and ability to work together with their team, I think that is what makes them successful.”

From Malone’s point of view, the research can never cross the finish line if it isn’t helped off the start line in the first place.

“We invest $5 (million) to $10 million in these companies to help them get through and reach the patient. So when you think about the position my mom was in — as she was fighting and healthy — a lot of times we’d say, ‘OK, well, someone will come up with something. And then maybe if you can make it through this next round of chemo, there’ll be something that can cure you.’ So thinking about being able to use finances to help companies accelerate their research and companies to reach the patient is a nice place to be,” Malone explained.

She takes particular pride in the science they’ve helped generate in Pittsburgh.

“We fund research out of the University of Pittsburgh, and a lot of those scientists do work with the Hillman Cancer Center,” Malone said. “A lot of times, cancer cells are recurrent. Figuring out how to stop those cells from growing — or maybe a technology that helps remove the tumors or treat the tumors in different ways — are the kinds of things that get me excited. So, in the future, another mom won’t have to deal with this. Or another family.”

‘An easy 26 miles’

Margo and Mary ran Pittsburgh’s half-marathon in 2022 in honor of their mother. They still run together in the mornings to feel connected to each other and their mom.

On Sunday, when Margo won the full marathon, she did so as one of seven elite women’s runners in the race, finishing nearly seven minutes ahead of the field.

“It was a pretty easy 26 miles because every time it got hard, it was never hard to think of a reason to keep going,” Malone said.

Those reasons were her friends and family members lining the streets of Pittsburgh in support of her race — and her reason for running it.

“Being through the streets of Pittsburgh was so special. My dad (Paul) was out there. I saw him in Shadyside. I had to kind of hold back tears because he and my mom were so supportive,” Malone said. “Anytime it got hard, I thought of (Midge), but I also thought of all the people that supported our family when she was sick. They were on the course. My cousins were at Mile 23. So that was an easy one to say, ‘Well, I got to keep going. They are at Mile 23.’”

And victory was just a bit beyond Mile 26.

Congratulations to Pittsburgh's very own Margo Malone - the 2023 @DICKS Pittsburgh Marathon Women's 1st place finisher! #MOVEPittsburgh #RunnerofSTEEL pic.twitter.com/5GfhlulsDV

— Pittsburgh Marathon (@PGHMarathon) May 7, 2023

By Monday morning, Malone was in her car heading to her office in Bakery Square — running the marathon against the disease that claimed her mother’s life.

It may be a harder 26 miles than what she ran Sunday. But the motivation appears to be very much the same.