Bob Welch

The Register Guard

Seeing the running shoes. That’s when it hit Hope Lyda in January, just before the trip to Wyoming, where her husband, Marc, was to undergo a rare brain surgery.

He wouldn’t have said yes had he not thought he’d make it — and yet he freely admits he talked to a friend and pastor about his memorial service, just in case.

“It hit me five minutes before we left,” Hope says. “I looked down at (those) shoes and I got choked up, knowing there was a chance Marc wouldn’t be coming home.”

When the Eugene Marathon begins Sunday, it’ll be thanks to no small effort from Marc Lyda, 44, whose coordinating of nearly 1,000 volunteers is a piece of cake compared with what the rest of his life has been like lately.

Not that he’s particularly thrilled that I’m writing about him today.

“He tends to be fairly guarded about how he feels,” says race director Richard Maher, who knew Marc through the Eugene Running Club and hired him last year to coordinate volunteers.

Lyda is a hardcore runner and cyclist and an assistant cross-­country coach at Northwest Christian College.

In 2006, his health obstacles initially came more like cramps than some 22-mile meltdown: occasional migraine headaches, a pulsing in his ear while lake-swimming for a triathlon and some “snowblindness” in his vision.

Then, he hit the wall: Doctors discovered an arteriovenous malformation in the back of his brain, a knot of veins and arteries that threatened his life. “I went from running six-minute miles to seven-minute miles to pacing someone in a race at 8:15,” he says.

After two brain surgeries and two eye surgeries, Lyda was basically right back where he’d started — with little hope for a fix. But amid it all, he managed to coordinate volunteers for last year’s race. He worked full time for four months. “Had the marathon not hired him to be the detail guy, it wouldn’t have happened like it did,” says Michael Caley, an assistant volunteer coordinator. “He’s as influential about the nuts and bolts of this thing, and about it being a success, as anyone involved.”

In the spring, Hope, an editor with Harvest House Publishers, Googled everything she could find on the malformation. She sent letters and scans to medical centers at Stanford, Baylor and Northwestern. All confirmed the seriousness of Marc’s condition.

But in July the two made an amazing discovery: A cousin of Marc’s had had similar “multiple fistulas” surgically removed seven years before by a Dallas surgeon. She had experienced no more problems.

Marc and Hope tracked down her doctor, Thomas Kopitnik, who had moved to Wyoming. After running tests on Marc, he and his partner, Dr. Debra Steele, agreed to do the surgery at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center.

The day before the couple left, they showed up for a lunch: Nicole Teter, an Olympic 800-meter runner and a fellow marathon worker, had made “Team Lyda” hats for the couple and for Marc’s co-­workers, to show solidarity. “Marc was really moved by that,” Hope says.

The two left for Wyoming. “I just assumed they were.......READ MORE