Through Stage 4 Breast Cancer, Christine Fischer Will Run NYC Marathon to 'Celebrate What My Body Can Do' (Exclusive)

Christine Fischer has watched her husband, professional runner Reed Fischer, race a lot of marathons.

“No knock on Reed, but his races never really inspired me to run marathons,” Christine, 30, says, laughing alongside Reed in a recent interview with PEOPLE. 

Then, at last year’s TCS New York City Marathon (NYCM), something changed. Christine is usually only at races to watch Reed, 29, who blazes through the 26.2-mile course in around 2 hours and 15 minutes (he finished 10th overall in the 2022 race), before heading off with him for press conferences and recovery time. But in 2023, Reed dropped out around mile 14, which meant that for the first time, Christine was able to hang out and watch runners of all speeds cross the finish line. 

“It was so inspiring to watch them come through,” she says. “That's really what sparked my interest in running a marathon. And I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe I do want to run!’ ”

Christine — an elite runner herself — is far from the average hobby jogger. But as a fifth grade teacher in Boulder, Colo. who was diagnosed with Stage 4 oligometastatic breast cancer in early 2023, Christine said that watching thousands of other people — with stories she did not know — during last year's marathon helped her see the challenges of racing through a different lens, with an eye toward “joy-centered” training.

On Sunday, Nov. 3, she will join 49 other educators selected by the NYCM's title sponsor Tata Consultancy Services to run 26.2 miles through New York as part of Team TCS Teachers.

“When I line up in New York, I’m going to be about two years into diagnosis and treatment,” Christine says. “And now I’m looking at planning my life ahead of me.”

Christine was diagnosed with breast cancer on Jan. 10, 2023, after finding a 3.5 centimeter lump in her breasts while pulling on a sports bra for a run. By then, the cancer had spread to her spine and sacrum. 

In an interview with PEOPLE last year, Christine said that she felt a “loss of control” following her diagnosis. 

The couple, who had married in 2021, wanted to start a family. But after her diagnosis, plans for the future seemed to belong to someone else. 

Christine started Googling her prospects — and they looked bleak. She read posts online that projected she would live for just one to three more years, tops.

She quickly began chemotherapy, using painful cooling caps designed to cause hypothermia to her scalp in order to keep her hair through the process. She also kept running, sometimes even just half a mile.

Nearly two years later — now on a daily pill with a monthly hormone therapy injection and bone-strengthening infusions every three months, along with routine scans and blood work — there is no evidence of cancer in her body, although with Stage 4 patients, doctors shy away from using the term “remission.” 

And while it’s impossible to know the future, the couple is still planning for it.

Before starting treatment, Christine froze her eggs, and with indefinite cancer treatment in her future, which makes it impossible to safely bear a child, the couple has begun efforts to find a surrogate.

They've also started filling up their schedules with epic adventures. In June, Christine and Reed traveled to Peru, where they hiked Machu Picchu during the Winter Solstice. 

And this school year, Christine — who played college basketball — is coaching the fifth- through eighth-grade girls’ team at Boulder Country Day School.

Teaching 10- and 11-year-olds and coaching the middle school team is all about giving them the opportunity “to try something new in a safe environment,” she says. “And maybe they fail and try again and eventually they succeed — or they take away all those lessons that they've learned along the way from those failures, and that is just as important.”

And her students got to be a part of Christine’s own marathon story — pushing her own boundaries — when TCS and Reed dropped by her classroom last May with the surprise announcement that she had been selected to run New York.

In the months that have followed, Reed — who will be cheering her along the route and “ready to give her a big, sweaty hug and a kiss” on Nov. 3 — wrote out a training program, coaching her through long runs and biking by her side. 

Recalling that running through chemotherapy was “the most grace I’ve ever given myself,” Christine says she is bringing that same compassion to her marathon.

Her training is about “being proud of myself where I’m at now,” she says. “Because a year ago I was not here, and two years ago I would never have thought this could be a reality for me right now.”

Come race day, she wants to “be present in the moment and celebrate all the work we’ve done.”

That said, she has a big goal: She would like to qualify for the Boston Marathon, striding through New York in under three hours and 25 minutes.

Running 26.2 miles through New York’s five boroughs will be her chance to take back control and “challenge my body and mind in a way that I’ve never challenged it before” while “celebrating what my body can do.”

“With each mile, I just want to acknowledge and celebrate where I’m at,” she says. “And that’s a culmination of a lot of hard work on my part, on my doctor’s part and on my community’s part for lifting me up.”

“At the starting line, I’m going to be centered in this joyful place,” Christine says. “Because two years ago Google was telling me that I maybe wouldn’t be on this planet right now. But not only am I here on this planet, but I’m running a marathon. And I plan to be on this planet for a long time. So when things get hard, it’s a reminder I’ve been through hard things and I can keep pushing through this hard as well. This is a victory lap.”